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 and the Digital Library
Digital humanities
Since technology and innovative ideas for what composes the digital library are constantly advancing, case studies must be routinely conducted to continue to be kept up to date. This book is comprised of studies that are most current to 2007. It includes research conveyed by respected experts in library and information science that provides a window into the theory, technological advances, and unique approaches information management for the digital world. The book focuses particularly on the advances in the world of archives and the digitization of the texts and objects archivists work with. The book includes a case study of LSTA-grant funded California Local History Digital Resources Project; expanding traditional archival digitations projects beyond the single institution; a case study of the California Cultures Project; top ten themes in usability issues; case studies of focus groups, interviews, ethnographic studies, usability studies, and web log analysis; creating a mutual partnership with the digital library; technical trials in harvesting and then managing Web archives; metadata approaches to provide technical, descriptive, and preservation related information pertaining to archived Web sites. There are many more topics discussed in this book useful for archivists, librarians, library administrators, archival educators, students, and library information educators.
Landis, William E. (Ed)
Chandler, Robin L. (Ed)
Routledge
2007
Polk, Victoria
The Hawthorne Press Inc.
Book
ISBN-13: 978-0789034380
ISBN-10: 0789034387
Best Practice Guidelines for Digital Collections
Curation
The "Best Practice Guidelines for Digital Collections" provides the essential, critical standards that all digital librarians, archivists and scholars should implement when designing a digital collection. The article also includes guidelines for adapting the standards according to the unique collections and mission of the archiving institution.
The article introduces best practices for developing selection criteria and for determining the personnel and technical resources required to secure and maintain the collection. Following an in-depth review of copyright issues, the article discusses the necessary elements and work-flow of a digital collections project. These elements include: metadata, quality control procedures, usability testing, web design, and technical specifications for media types and encoding.
Schreibman, S.
Carignan, Y.
Evander, J.
Gueguen, G.
Hanlon, A.
Murray, K.
Roper, J.
Ross, T.
University of Maryland Libraries
2007-05-04
Polk, Victoria
Journal Article
http://ourdigitalworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/DigitizationBestPractices_Schreibman.pdf
Bringing User-Centered Design to the Field of Language Archives
Curation
Within this academic journal, Wasson et al provides the reader with both research and findings from their self-conducted workshop that sparks conversation between “fields of user-centered design (UCD) and language archives” (Wasson et al). Within the article itself, there is emphasis on the challenges of digital archiving in regard to language archiving, navigating cultural practices, and then using the understanding of these concepts to make informed archive design decisions. These concepts all arise within their workshop, “User-Centered Design of Language Archives.” Specifically, a very important discovery that is made within the workshop is how, “most language archives are not meeting the needs of most users” (Wasson et al).
I found the information within this article and, further, within their study, to be extremely informative of and pertinent to the study of digital archiving and the challenges that arise from the format of language. The focus on the user and user-based design is a step towards personalizing and adapting existing archives while also setting a new standard for language archives. As mentioned prior, this study not only analyzed existing archives, but it also uncovered flaws within the archiving practice. This showcases the relevancy and need for this study and I believe it also warrants the inclusion of such an item within the showcase.
Wasson, Christina
Holton, Gary
Roth, Heather S.
University of Hawaii Press
2016-11-16
Meagan Roge
Online Journal
ISSN: 1934-5275
Building Digital Archives, Descriptions, and Displays: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Archivists and Librarians
Web archiving
Author and archivist Frederick Stielow reviews fundamental principles and practices of archiving and outlines the technical steps and intellectual rationale for adding metadata, developing encoding schemas, and designing the web interface. Of particular interest to builders and managers of digital archives are the guidelines for preparing collections for deep and surface web searching. Encoding finding aids according to technological and professional standards may ensure long-term preservation but may or may not represent culturally appropriate or fully accessible content for a larger public. A thorough understanding of the content's cultural as well as technical properties should inform the vocabulary, encoding, description, and representation of the digitized artifacts.
Stielow, Frederick
Neal Schuman Publishers
2003
Polk, Victoria
Book
ISBN-13: 978-1555704636
ISBN-10: 1555704638
Building Digital Archives, Descriptions, and Displays: A how-to-Do-It Manual for Archivists and Librarians (How-to-Do-It Manuals for Libraries)
Digital humanities
Noted archivist and library educator Frederick Stielow provides a comprehensive guide to efficiently adding content to the Web - and to creating Web-based descriptions and finding aids that will draw surfers to the library's, museum's, or other repository's Web site that houses them. All major digital approaches and languages - SGML, XML, and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) - as well as established descriptive standards such as the Dublin Core and Open URL are covered. Options for capturing images, sounds, and video resources and automated techniques for converting optical characters are explained step-by-step. As he did is his earlier critically acclaimed "Creating Virtual Libraries", Stielow provides much more than just technical guidance: he also discusses how to integrate digital archives (and their associated records) with turnkey library automation systems and provides a thorough discussion of policies regarding what to digitize and post. Here is the ideal primer for project management and the perfect general guide for managing digital archives.
Stielow, Frederick
Neal Schuman Pub
2003
Johnson, Richard
Book
ISBN-13: 978-1555704636
Building digital archives: Design decisions: A best practice example
Curation
This conference by Meyer et al discusses the concept of digital archive building and the best methods to, “search for an applicable and adequate data or document model [and] software tools which meets the requirements” (Meyer et al) of making digital library applications. Within their conference, they explained how there is not an ideal document model or system, there is not a “one-size-fits-all” (Meyer et al), but that each document model or system is unique to the information that is being digitally archived. This conference goes in-depth on the technical implementation of aspects of a digital archive, factors that will ultimately determine the sustainability and the maintenance of the archive. These ideas are all included within the “digital archive project DARL (Digitales Archiv Rostocker Liederbuch, engl.)” (Meyer et al).
I found the information found within this conference pertinent to the overall understanding of a digital archive. I think that it can be easy to lose sight of how archives, while they have the same goal and purpose, are all unique and, thus, made differently. Understanding how an archive is made is extremely important and this resource helps readers to understand the technical side of design decisions that impact an archive in big ways.
Meyer, Holger
Bruder, Ilvio
Finger, Andreas
Heuer, Andreas
IEEE
2015-01-06
Meagan Roge
Presentation
DOI: 10.1109/ETTLIS.2015.7048172
Challenges of Digital Preservation.
Curation
Andrea Goethals, manager of digital preservation and repository services at the Harvard Library, delivered this presentation on 22 April 2011 to an audience of undergraduate students at Harvard University. Goethals aims at encouraging students to acknowledge and care about the preservation of digital heritage, taking into account especially the challenges that libraries and heritage institutions face presently and in the future. Goethals argues that among the “tsunami” of data on the web, there may be countless items worth preserving. Yet archiving mere digital bits is insufficient; software needs to be able to read the formats in order to ensure content remains meaningful. But this dependence on technology is problematic: Goethals emphasizes that technologies are fleeting, to the point that older content may become unreadable and thus meaningless. The challenge for digital archivists, according to Goethal, is thus twofold: on the one hand, the bits need to be kept safe through the highest quality of preservation possible. On the other hand, information must be kept usable in spite of transient, fleeting technologies.
Goethals, Andrea
04-22-2011
Laura Moeller
Power Point Presentation
http://library.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Challenges_of_Digital_Preservation.pptx
Collection-Based Persistent Digital Archives-Part 2 [and] MyLibrary: Personalized Electronic Services in the Cornell University Library [and] Creating Accessible Digital Imagery
Archives
Moore et al.’s “Collection-Based Persistent Digital Archives” provides a brief view into the design and development of a persistent email archive that housed over a million messages, a project that offered students at Cornell personalized library services, and an effort to digitize a massive amount of images for a project in the UK. In the three associated articles, the authors break down their process of designing, and implementing a digital archiving system into four components: support for ingestion, archival storage, information discovery, and presentation of the collection. They define the ingestion process as the process of including, and documenting objects while “wrap[ping them] as XML digital objects,” and cataloguing them for future retrieval. The storage phase is broken down into similar stages where objects, collections, and containers are defined through the application of metadata. Their information discovery, and presentation stages involve the development of software, interfaces, referents, and representations for archived objects.
Moore, Reagan, Chaitan Baru, Arcot Rajasekar, Bertram Ludaescher, Richard Marciano, Michael Wan, Wayne Schroeder, and Amarnath Gupta
D-Lib Magazine
2000-04
Foley, Christopher
Journal Article
Conserving Digital Resources: Issues and Future Access
Copyright
The following article explores the issues surrounding digital preservation. Especially when it comes to deciding what should and shouldn’t be preserved. In addition to that, it is important to note the ease in which something published online can be shared. Unlike something that was physically published/printed thus limiting who has access to it. As a result, the design of an archive requires constant though necessary management of activities over a long period of time. However, for that to work, guidelines need to be put in place prior to it being put into practice. As it helps with figuring out what to collect and save because not only does it limit system overload it keeps unnecessary things from getting in. That’s not to say that what wasn’t selected isn’t important, it just that like physical books it’d be really hard to save everything. On the flip side, “Born digital data is too voluminous and too fragile to be left to the caprice of short-term needs and priorities.” So, to help those who might be looking at something in the future saving selectively is key. That way just enough is needed to provide an accurate record, which is why looking at issues in various ways is essential.
Taylor & Francis
July-Sept., 2014
Hannah Baker
Journal Article