In “Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace,” Renée Sentilles argues, “Our relationship with sources changes as they become more accessible, more abundant, and less tangible" (136). Sentilles discusses the usability of digital archives, particularly the Internet, using her experience studying the life of Adah Isaacs Menken to point out the differences digital archives bring to history scholarship. First, she states the Internet creates an excess of information and sources, when historians are used to working with a scarcity of sources. Second, she discusses how the community on the Internet can replace the solitude of historical writing. Ultimately, Sentilles concludes that, while one can conduct parts of research on the Internet, the digital medium cannot replace the experience of being in the physical location with archive personnel.
Archivist, Audra Yun, illuminates several fundamental digital archiving issues in her blog and provides critical commentary for the many conferences and workshops she attends. In her most recent entry, "The present and future of audiovisual archives: Screening the Future 2012, Los Angeles," she discusses critical archiving issues including: challenges of digital preservation and updating metadata for researching audio-visual data, social implications of personal digital archiving, and using digital archives as critical reading and media literacy. Yun embeds links to the diverse digital archives, software tools, and web sites of the presenters she features in her blogs, including her own publications and presentations. Her belief that "most primary sources belong in the hands (or on the screens) of users," and her mission as an archivist to "add context and longevity" to records of historic value are both evident in the information and educational service her blog provides its users.
Trajectories of Personal Archiving: Practical and Ethical Considerations
In the article “Trajectories of Personal Archiving: Practical and Ethical Considerations,” published in the academic journal Geographical Review, Knapp discusses the intricacies archiving has for the professional individual, as well as the ethical concerns archiving personal works. Knapp offers that the digitization of one’s personal notes can be problematic when examined with their body of work and poses that there may need to be limitations on what is preserved.
Transformation in Teaching: Social Media Strategies in Higher Education
This book tries to refocus the true purpose of social media and how it can be used to help further students’ education. The greatest issues educators face with social media is not privacy concerns rather motivating the students to participate in the learning process. Each chapter incorporates a new methodology according to the discipline the author presents, but each methodology integrates the social media as pedagogical. The author states the challenges and successes in bringing in the social media according to the particular discipline.
Transformation Of Knowledge In The Digital Age Environment Through Library
Libraries are an important part of society today as they provide equal access to all who use it. It is home to a wide variety of resources such as internet, technology, literary resources, and information—all made free to the public through the library. As information has become more and more digitized, however, libraries are slowing down when it comes to technological advances: when looking at the online database, it is more than likely that a book is only available physically rather than being available online. Due to the nature of the library as a medium for sharing information, it is imperative that these mediums be transformed to help users find information faster. The Transformation Of Knowledge offers different solutions to help libraries stay up-to-date with technology, while also addressing the many challenges that could come forth with such endeavors.
Lal, D. D. Sinha, Manoj Kumar Talwar, Yogita
Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives
Transforming the Authority of the Archive from editors and contributors Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes is a collection of articles written by vcontributors from a range of institutions including small liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, Ivy Leagues, large research institutions, and community-based collections. Contributors include, in addition to the editors, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Gianluca De Fazio, Myranda Fuentes, Sam Koreman, Mary A. Armstrong, Jennifer Wellnitz, Michele Hardesty, Alana Kumbier, Christopher Jones, Elizabeth Rodrigues, Rachel Schnepper, Temitayo Wolff, Nora Claire Miller, Elise Nacca, Elon Lang, aems emswiler, Marco Robinson, Phyllis Earles and Daren White, and Jane Field. The collection is focused on teaching methods and archival methods that emphasize records from individual and community voices that have historically been hidden and underrepresented in "neutral" archives. The methods offered contain ideas for significantly and sometimes radically altering the way archival authority is determined and destributed. The models, methods, and activities in this collection seek to engage students in creating, analyzing, preserving, and discussing archives in a thoughtful and creative manner. Transforming the Authority of the Archive offers a multitude of fresh perspectives and ideas on teaching archival practices and creating archives and is an important read for anyone interested in archival studies.
Understanding Copyfraud: Public Domain Images and False Claims of Copyright
Chris Needham opens the door on the common copyfraud that occurs when museums misrepresent or restrict rights in a way that go against public domain copyright law. Needham first explains relevant copyright issues such as the copyright of certain artworks and books. Copyright lasts for about seventy years, but certain copyright laws can be a gray area when it comes to preservation of artifacts. How these artifacts become part of the public domain is a photograph is taken of the artifact and posted online for anyone to see much like a virtual museum. The author then dives into how the copyfraud of archives affect universities, publishing houses, and museums. In a more positive light, Needham shows how librarians and visual resource managers are supporting museums change their approach to copyright and copyfraud. Needham focuses on how this change is transforming scholarship and allowing scholars and librarians to better serve the public. Chris Needham’s article is a well-written piece that dives into the issues that archives face with copyright laws. While copyright laws have been around for a long time, it can be difficult to interpret those laws for very specific situations, and it can be easy to commit copyfraud without realizing. This article is eye-opening and an important read for anyone within the scholarship field.
Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America
In his introduction to Understanding Digital Humanities, David Berry traces the history of digital humanities—an evolving method and theory of interpreting the effects of digitization and computation on society and culture, while simultaneously adopting and inventing computational processes for guiding its nascent discipline. Notable scholars and pathfinders in the field were selected to write the essays featured in this book, which illuminate fundamental and often controversial issues of the digital humanities,. These issues include the relationship between computation and literacy, aesthetics, gender studies, and the invention and application of data mining tools for interpreting vast quantities of cultural data. Of particular interest to the digital archivist is the Jussi Parikka’s essay, “Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archaeology and Digital Humanities.” Parikka believes the archive offers a basis for theory and theoretical backing for digital humanities work, especially studies that focus on calculating effects and representing patterns. The non-narrative, non-discursive, and database logic of the archive presents a digital space, a metaphor, and a method for ingesting and interpreting the vast amount of information transmitted daily through digital media. By breaking down the study of digital media and culture into a study of the digital object’s materiality, its purposes, its historical and cultural context, and its representation and preservation, the archive as method becomes apparent—an apt metaphor Berry uses to describe the Internet’s resources, the “new infinite archive.” Digital archivists will also find the final chapter, “Transdisciplinarity and Digital Humanities: Lessons Learned from Developing Text-Mining Tools for Textual Analysis” by Yu-Wei Lin, useful for promoting collaborative efforts between software engineers and humanists, and for extending the reach of archives into scholarly research and knowledge creation.
Unsettling Archival Research is a collection of articles examining the way archives are currently created, curated, and maintained and how these methods might be improved. Unsettling Archival Research highlights how current archival methods overlook or outright ignore multiple individual and community accounts of history, due to either the creators or the means of record creation. This collection details different ways of looking at archives, new methods of creation and curation of archives in order to preserve the memories of underrepresented communities, and alternative methods of teaching which allow for open and critical thought on the methods of archival creation and curation. The articles highlight the tendency for archives to follow history in being selective in the truths the curators choose to share and reasons why this should stop. The contributors look at the historical treatment of the archive towards black communities, queer communities, women, incarcerated individuals, and more in this engaging and enlightening new take on the archive.
Kirsch, Gesa E.; García, Romeo; Allen, Caitlin Burns; Smith, Walker P.
https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.9669312 https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.9669312
Vatican Library Digital Archiving Project
This video is an overview of the Vatican’s efforts to preserve and provide access to its extensive historical library. The video explores the unique challenge of preservation historical texts; while allowing open access to materials. The latter section of the video explores the logistical aspect of digitizing 80,000 manuscripts and 41 million pages of text. No long term large manuscript preservation projects of this nature exists. NTT Data developed the AMLAD software to digitize and organize content. Emphasis is placed on the browsing element of the project as the audience is the general public.