"Best Practices for Digital Archiving: An Information Life Cycle Approach."
Digital humanities
Gail Hodge asserts that the rapid dissemination of digital “objects” occurred with “little regard for the long-term preservation of digital information.” Given the nature of the digital world, her analysis is as relevant in 2015 as it was in 2000. In an environment where file deletion, corruption, or accessibility is a constant concern, Hodge provides a step-by-step process that outlines some best practices to avoid some of the pitfalls digital practitioners face. She argues that rapid technological advances require users to incorporate appropriate standards during the creative process. Without a systematic approach, preservation becomes problematic.
To address that issue, this study surveyed a variety of institutions including libraries, research institutions, and database publishers to gather information on what best practices had helped them confront these challenges. Hodge breaks the process down into six categories: creation, acquisition, metadata, storage, preservation, and access. In each aspect of the digital life-cycle, she gives practical advice on things such as determining what and what not to archive, copyright issues, hardware and software concerns, and migration issues. In regard to preservation, Hodge asserts that one of the most important aspects is to maintain the “look and feel” of the archive, despite what technological changes occur.
Hodge, Gail M.
D-Lib Magazine
2000
Robert Clarke
Journal Article
A Vision of the Role and Future of Web Archives
Web archiving
The history of the web and the record of its impact on society may never fully be realized if measures to record and preserve its content are not carefully and consistently maintained. Leetaru identifies the inconsistencies in web archiving by public institutions, such as the Library of Congress, and commercial enterprises, such as the New York Times. He explains current trends for limiting the size of the “crawl” (ingesting web content into the archive) and the web site’s rate of change may not promote discovery of patterns and insights for future scholars and historians. Leetaru proposes web archiving institutions solicit the users and data miners for selecting and presenting the web archive’s content and developing the protocol for ingesting web artefacts.
In addition to increasing the collaboration of a broad web archiving community, Leetaru suggests web archives should also increase the visibility of its holdings and provide sufficient contextual information for the different versions and replacements of web content. Like Wikipedia’s chronology of updates and editions for each page of content, Leetaru believes a web archive should reveal the source code as well as origins of its content. In response to copyright restrictions and rights to privacy, he recommends “snapshots” and limiting algorithms to “surface-level analyses.” By opening access to the intellectual content of the web artefacts and simultaneously adhering to both property and technical standards, preservation of the web archive and the potential for future research can be assured.
Leetaru, Kalev
University of Illinois
2012
Polk, Victoria
Document
http://netpreserve.org/sites/default/files/resources/VisionRoles.pdf
Academic Librarians' Varying Experiences of Archives: A Phenographic Study
Archives
This article reports on a study investigating academic librarians' varying experiences of archives in order to promote understanding and communication among librarians and archivists. A qualitative, phenomenographic approach was adopted for the study. Three different ways of experiencing archives were identified from analysis of interviews. Archives may be experienced by academic librarians as 1) a place which protects collections; 2) resources to be used in accomplishing tasks such as teaching, research, or outreach; or 3) manifestations of politics. The third way of experiencing archives is the most complex, incorporating both the other experiences. The results of this study may help librarians, especially academic librarians, and archivists communicate more clearly on joint projects involving archival collections thereby enabling more collaboration.
Wakimoto, Diana K.; Bruce, Christine S.
Journal of Academic Librarianship
2014-09
Allen, Amber
Journal Article
Acts of Translation: Digital Humanities and the Archive Interface
Web archiving
Elish and Trettien argue the interface of digital collections transfers meaning through its design and acts as a metonym for the sponsoring web site. They scrutinize the visual interface and usability of three web sites housing large digitized collections and focus on the ideologies associated with the representation and mission of each site. By applying what they refer to as “visual epistemology,” Elish and Trettien identify the tools and visual markers that facilitate access to and navigation through three digital archives: NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship), “Objects of History” (George Mason University), and SFMOMA Art Scope (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Both presentation of the items and navigation through the site work in tandem to produce meaning, with the preferred result being a minimizing of the interface and a maximizing of the content. In this article, the authors underscore the “expressive potential of digital form” and offer a method for designing and critiquing digital archives.
Elish, Madeleine Claire
Trettien, Whitney
MIT 6 Conference
April 2009
Polk, Victoria
Document
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Elish.pdf
Addressing Major Digital Archiving Challenges
data mining
The proceedings of a conference regarding the issues faced by the European Commission’s FP7 PSP-funded project, E-ARK. At the time of its publishing, the project had recently shifted its focus to open access, which had a profound effect on the methods of collection and analysis. The conference was centered on demonstrating the issues the project was facing at this point in its life and proposed solutions for the future.
Delve, Janet; Anderson, David; Wilson, Andrew
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation. School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
2015
Ramos, Madison
CC BY 4.0 International ; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Accession Number: edsbas.2F616B39
After Image: Writing in the Age of Photography, Film and Digital Media
Archives
Integrates and explains the role of writing, film, and photography in the digital world.
Gironda, Belle C.
Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities And Social Sciences
1999
McLean, Sarah
Protected under standard copyright regulations
e-book
http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=9badd9bc-a0bf-4538-9494-365125eecb5f%40sessionmgr4004&vid=1&hid=4214&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=mzh&AN=1999042171
All About Digital Photos
Archives
This website is a brief primer on digital photos will deal with the world of digital photography and digital photos. It will answer some of the basic questions about digital photography such as What exactly is a digital photo, "What is DPI", and "How do I properly archive digital photos.
Watson, Ken W.
2003
Pat Korosec
© 2003-2014 Ken W. Watson
Electronic
Website
All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist
Archives
"Introduced by Clive Phillpot, and including artists and writers such as Gustav Metzger, Bruce McLean, Barbara Steveni, John Latham, Barry Flanagan, Edward Burra, Penelope Curtis, and Neal White, All This Stuff breaks new ground in the field of archive theory. It documents the innovative ways in which the arts are challenging the distinctions, processes, and crossovers between artworks and archives. This critical reexamination exemplifies how the field of art archiving is changing theory and practice as well as our understanding of what an archive is, or could be. Valuable insights are given into the archival process and the book also explores how archives can be made accessible and the unpredictable ways in which they may be explored and reinterpreted in the future.
Vaknin, Judy (Editor)
Stuckey, Karyn (Editor)
Lane, Victoria (Editor)
Libri Publishing
May 1, 2013
Webb, Kimberly
Book/ E-book
ISBN-13: 978-1907471766
Archival Theory and Digital Historiography: Selection, Search, and Metadata as Archival
Processes for Assessing Historical Contextualization
Digital Humanities
This article focuses on the application of archival theory to create digital representations of history, and how this has created a new theory within digital humanities scholarship termed digital historiography—a theory which focuses on analyzing and studying how digital technologies and historical practice interact. The sudden, rapid development of digital humanities scholarship and its increasing emphasis on interdisciplinarity has left scholars without a criteria to properly assess the validity and importance of digital representations, leaving them without a means to determine what scholarly value should be assigned to the project. The author provides a solution to this problem by proposing three processes of archival theory as criteria: selection, search, and the application of metadata. To support this idea, the author examines several digital representations to illustrate how selection, search functionality, and metadata application impact, inform, and interpret the historical knowledge that a digital representation aims to impart. While the author believes technology has improved the ways in which history is conveyed to wider, non-specialized audiences, he explains the important role that more traditional approaches have on archival theory and historical practice and argues for their assimilation into digital humanities scholarship.
Sternfeld, Joshua
Society of American Archivists
2011
Wolf, Casey
Journal Article
Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice
Archives
Jimerson argues that in the information age, knowledge is power, and power is determined by those who determine what information will be preserved for the future, i.e., archivists. Therefore, archivists should use their power to benefit all members of society. He contends that archivists should adopt a social conscience and “promote accountability, open government, diversity, and social justice.” In addition, this social conscience can be implemented through objectivity (he explains the difference between objectivity and neutrality) in which archivists can address social issues without abandoning their professional standards and values. He says their role does not prohibit political advocacy, and Jimerson argues that archivists have both a moral and a professional responsibility to balance the power of the status quo with that of the marginalized. Therefore, they should help restore social wrongs and support the causes for justice and community consciousness among these marginalized groups. They should be public advocates and agents of change because they have a collective responsibility to ensure the preservation of information (or evidence) for “accountability, individual rights, and social justice.” Jimerson believes archivists has two main goals: (1) reflect diverse societies and give a voice to those marginalized, and (2) increase professional membership among marginalized groups. And, these commitments must be international in order to be effective.
Jimerson, Randall
Society of the American Archivist
2007
Polk, Victoria
© 2015
Journal Article
http://archivists.metapress.com/content/m0r3p382j155/