interactivity

Read/viewed:

Bearman D, Trant J. Interactivity comes of age: museums and the World Wide Web. Museum International. October 1999;51(4):20-24.

"The Wiki and the digital library," Jeremy Frumkin, OCLC Systems & Services. 2005, Volume 21 Issue 1.

Online Finding Aids: Are They Practical? CJ Hostetter - Journal of Archival Organization, 2004 Vol. 2, p 107.

Abdication or empowerment? User involvement in library, archives and records services.Preview By: Robinson, Leith. Australian Library Journal, Feb2007, Vol. 56 Issue 1, p30-35, 6p.

Encoded Archival Description on the Internet (Wendy Duff and Daniel Pitti)

I have been looking at EAD and interactivity for the last couple of weeks (EAD discussion pending)...Many of the articles take EAD as matter of course, as the best available finding aid format, although everyone seems dubious about MARC. The Bearman/Trant piece is more specifically about museums, following along from my last post, and at this point is 10 years old. But in addition to discussion of cool new (at the time) interactive features in museums--although many of them that I looked at have not progressed much beyond the initial (and probably NSF-grant funded, at this time?) efforts, which is disheartening--they also mention the opportunity for restructuring that Web representation provides. This does not ring true at the LBJ library, where the webmasters are a separate entity from the archives department, rather than integrated into it--I think they underestimate the intimidation factor for professionals who do not have the requisite skill sets. I think the reason for the dearth of good online finding aids is very often the result of this kind of disjuncture.

Frumkin's piece on digital libraries and wikis is also pretty dated, mostly about Ask a Librarian (and other virtual reference) and additions to content management systems. For mys purposes the discussion of user-annotated finding aids are more interesting, although he glides over what I think is the fundamental issue with wikis in this context, that we are NOT talking about a Wikipedia-level worldwide community of users, but rather a few people, some of whom may be highly expert but the rest not. Would individual commentary, reviewed by archivists, not be more appropriate in the context? But how will researchers feel to be, god forbid, corrected, if necessary, by archivists? And will they jealously guard their research? At LBJ we have a surprising number of researchers who check No, they do not want to be contacted by other researchers interested in their topic. I think there is some question as to whether people will want to contribute, as useful as the product of these contributions would be.

In her report Robinson is dubious about user involvement in libraries and archives, on the grounds that it will worsen the digital divide, threaten staff, isolate patrons, and create security problems for digital documents (this is an eminently solvable problem!). Like much of the digital library readings I did for the Management of Digital Libraries class, she comes down on services as the way for libraries to make their presence felt and appreciated in the digital environment.

The Hostetter 2002 article, "Online Finding Aids: Are They Practical?" is one of the most on-point that I have come across in readings for this project, and it raises a number of interesting issues. She administered a survey to archivists in 20 institutions about finding aids and discusses the results. It is very helpful in illuminating how archives use online finding aids in the real world, and what they see as the opportunities and challenges therein. She found that EAD is the markup of choice (no surprise) and that the biggest challenges to improvement of finding aids are time, money and staff (also no surprise). She references the Tibbo/Maho article I read earlier on the difficulty of finding EAD finding aids with search engines, information she hints that archivists are unaware of. She does discuss lots of potential benefits to online finding aids--like increased donations--which are interesting, but still the archivists she interviewed still to me seem to be inordinately attached to the notion that finding aids are more useful that digital collections, when I have seen lots of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps because archivists are thinking in terms of PhDs and other serious researchers?

I think the most surprising and controversial idea Robinson encounters is that access may not be an unmitigated good. Archivists said things like increased use increases demands on archivists' time (isn't that what they're there for?) and the Web leads neophyte researchers to believe that they will find good stuff in the archives relatively easily. This is the first time I have seen this issue laid bare. Archivists, knock it off! None of the archivists interviewed mention user studies, everything is discussed from an institutional effectiveness perspective, which seems to me to give us a good idea of what's wrong with archives.

For next week:
EAD
including Smith I. Preparing Locally Encoded Electronic Finding Aid Inventories for Union Environments: A Publishing Model for Encoded Archival Description. Information Technology & Libraries [serial online]. June 2008;27(2):26-30.