Tag Archives: archives

Cultural lessons from the crowd in the cloud

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In the last couple of weeks I’ve encountered some great insight into and evidence of the potential effect of large public networks on the work of making cultural assets accessible. It has come from two separate sources – Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, but also the first ever public conversation between Wikimedia and the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums).

I haven’t finished the book yet, so my focus here is on what the GLAM sector might take away from the conference (although no doubt the book is infiltrating my thinking.) The following points are not neatly sewn-up instructional lessons, and of course, people will disagree, but I believe the following are important considerations for those of us working to make cultural assets accessible online.

1. A completely different process of authorisation

I heard a lot of talk about how Wikipedia lacks authority and I heard a lot of what seemed like fear that its perceived dodginess would infect cultural institutions and jeopardise their authority. Well, for me, an almost opposite view is far more compelling.

Cultural institutions hold in their collections assets that have authority because they are original sources. No question; nothing will jeopardise that. And academic research accrues authority through the process of peer review, or by being written by someone who has accrued authority in the course of their professional career.

Wikipedia has an entirely different relationship with authority. Its articles are by definition, necessarily and absolutely not original research. And yes, Wikipedia editing is amateur. But the amazing thing is that Wikipedia articles can achieve a form of authority by virtue of the fact that the community of editors (which includes anyone who wants to be in it) finds a neutral, consensus position, and the article settles into relatively stable content. That stability is a genuine, honourable form of authority. It is not invested through credentials but emerges – and continues to emerge – out of open dialogue. And because Wikipedia gives voice to the community rather than to an individual or institution, in my view, Wikipedian authority is of great value.

I’m not suggesting that Wikipedia is the only source we need. On the contrary, it is vital to check the original sources, to seek out other sources (including primary sources!), to read critically and to adopt your own position. But Wikipedia is an excellent starting point. How many of us would deny that we regularly use it?! And the fact that verifiability it cites and refers readers to reliable sources positions it very well as a potential partner for cultural institutions.

2. A horde of willing and able enthusiasts

The arresting image below resides in the German Federal Archive but now – along with almost 100,000 others – it also resides in the Wikimedia Commons.

A photograph from the German National Archives via Wikimedia, June 1942 – Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-N0619-506

Jewish women with yellow star, Paris, June 1942 – from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia – Deutsches Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F000136-0009

It’s there because Mathias Schindler negotiated a deal with the Bundesarchiv, by which the archive would release 100,000 images into the public domain, and in return, Wikipedians would help by describing the photographs and matching person data (authority files – the A-word again!) in three places – German Wikipedia, National Archive and National Library.

As an employee of a federal archive, I am acutely conscious of the scale of the work involved in description and digitisation – core tasks usually prerequisite to making cultural assets accessible. Anything with the potential to distribute this load must be worth exploring. That way, more culture can be shared more widely which is, of course, the point.

The experience of the National Library of Australia in soliciting bulk text enhancement – via its wonderful Australian Newspapers project – provides further evidence that the public can be relied upon to do a mammoth amount of good work in enhancing OCR’d microfilm.

3. More accessible doesn’t seem to mean less profitable

And importantly, evidence is amassing at the Powerhouse Museum that increasing the accessible reach of your photographs, through the Flickr Commons, has a massive impact on how many people see and tag your images, but very little effect on image sales.

So…

In short, unlike Angelina, I came away from GLAM-wiki feeling fairly enthusiastic – like Gerard – about the possibilities for partnership.

Seeing the whole archive

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Yesterday I went to Dr Mitchell Whitelaw’s impressive presentation at the National Archives, about his Visible Archive project.

First, he gave a great introduction to why visualisations are important and how they can help you get a handle on a collection. In brief, search excels when you know which small piece you’re looking for. But if you want to explore the whole, you need another way in. Visualisations are great because by looking, we can find patterns and therefore intrinsic structures, which help us to make sense of and thereby navigate within large data sets.

Look at this beautiful visualisation of all the series in the Archives:

Every series – big square means

65k archival series – a big border => physically large; a big interior square => a lot of registered items

In the interactive version, you can click on any series and see the agencies that created or controlled it, and the other series to which it relates – eg an index to the series, or a successive series:

Series A432, which agencies created and controlled it, and its related series

Series A432, which agencies created and controlled it, and its related series

When you highlight one of the agencies, in this case CA5, the orange squares also indicate all the other series that that agency created.

Ah, the beauty of the series system! As Ross Gibbs, Director-General of the National Archives, said at the end of the presentation, Peter Scott would be elated.

But wait, there was more. Mitchell then showed us a deceptively simple visualisation of a single series, A1. It started with a tag cloud of the 150 most common words in the titles if items. ‘Naturalisation’ and ‘certificate’ were huge, and there were a lot of names, of places like Norfolk and Papua but also of people.

On hover you could see the spread of each term in items over time, and on click you could see a list of items. Then, if the item was digitised you could also have a look at each folio. Nice!

But the zing was yet to come. You can also combine two terms, or exclude one (eg, what is there in that series apart from all those naturalisation files? And in this way you could start to make discoveries, just by playing around with the tag cloud – for example, that there was a major cyclone in Darwin in 1937.

In so many ways, visualisation works as a way in to the records. We can’t predict all the ways that it works until we see them working. But sure as eggs there will be ways, not least because the national archives data has an in-built structure.

Thanks Mitchell ! for doing this great work and for making it look effortless. (I know it’s not!)

Push for pull

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In the spirit of yesterday’s post, I’m sharing some diagrams.

Last year I gave a conference paper about how user-generated description can improve archival findability. I began with the idea that every use of an archival record can generate a description, which (if it is captured) can make the record more findable in future.

f2-circuit

A visual elaboration of this concept is below. It begins in the middle. (And ‘RecordSearch’ is the collection database of the National Archives.)

Circuit of findability and enrichment

Ultimately, my point was also that archives should value users as much as users value archives. Their relationship is interdependent – archives engage users, users enrich archives.

width=

And really, if they are not used and interpreted and shared, archives are irrelevant.

The paper was well received, and I was especially pleased because Eric Ketelaar asked me if he could use the main diagram with his students.

A Depression story in the National Archives

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This post is an excerpt from a paper I wrote about findability of National Archives of Australia collection items for the 2008 Australian Society of Archivists conference. The idea is that anyone’s description of a record could be put to work in the service of findability. So the following is an example of a description, of a single page from a single file (of 220 pages) from a single series (of 13,749 files) from the National Archives collection (of around 45,000 series). (You can see why findability is an issue for us!)

The whole paper is available from the National Archives of Australia website.

In February 1934, Victor Fitzgibbon wrote a note to the Secretary of the Department of the Interior. The Department had provided him with four weeks’ work so that he could leave Canberra with his family. Having saved enough in that time to buy and recondition a truck, Mr Fitzgibbon sought a grant to register the vehicle for three months.

Grant for three months' truck registration

Victor Fitzgibbon’s request to the Department of the Interior for a grant to register his truck for three months so he could leave Canberra with his family.
National Archives of Australia: A659, 1939/1/16561

This note – the raw record – was used the same day it was written. CS Daley, the Assistant Secretary of the Civic Branch of the Department of the Interior, inserted Mr Fitzgibbon’s handwritten page into a typewriter to make his recommendation, which was to approve the grant ‘as a debit to the Alleviation of Distress, on the grounds that his continued residence in Canberra would be a greater burden to the Alleviation of Distress than the amount requested’. The Secretary of the Department must have been away, because he then added a further annotation: ‘In view of urgency, take action as proposed and resubmit for covering approval on Secretary’s return. CSD, 16.2.34′.

Another annotation suggests that the grant was issued four days later, and HC Brown, Secretary of the Department, noted his approval about a week after that.

In this first phase of the record’s life, it has served its purpose as attestation – to the need for the grant; and as documentation – of the Assistant Secretary’s recommendation for approval, and on what grounds; of the funds’ disbursal; and of the belated approval for such.

By reading the other documents in the file that relate to Mr Fitzgibbon, a fuller picture of the situation is revealed. It was the tail end of the Depression. Victor Fitzgibbon had arrived in Canberra after 1929, so he was ineligible for the rations available to other residents in similarly difficult circumstances. He was living at Ainslie married camp, with his pregnant wife and infant child. Several months prior to writing the letter described here, he had agreed to leave the Territory by mid-January if he was unable to find work. From the Department of the Interior’s point of view, the Fitzgibbon family had received special treatment up to that time, on account of the young child and Mrs Fitzgibbon’s pregnancy. In fact, one document notes that several years prior to this time, Victor Fitzgibbon’s father had been granted transport to go to Melbourne in 1929, and that he had returned ‘unannounced’ with Victor and his family.

Probably, the Department was keen to see the back of the Fitzgibbons, its sympathy having expired. The final instalment in the archival story is a small note pinned to the letter. ‘CD’ (presumably the Assistant Secretary, CS Daley) states ‘Has Fitzgerald [sic] actually left on the vehicle.’ Another hand has written ‘Please verify from police.’ A final note states ‘Fitzgibbon left Canberra Thursday last 22.2.34 – destination unknown’.

You can also see this record in Vrroom – virtual reading room.

History Summit in cloud-cuckoo land

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Over the weekend, I read the transcript of the Australian History Summit that Education Minister Julie Bishop convened after Prime Minister John Howard criticised school history as ‘fragmented stew of ‘themes’ and ‘issues’. The summit agenda was to revive the narrative approach to teaching history, and to agree on the main currents and big themes in Australia’s national story.

For me, whether a historical narrative is necessary – and even what gets into the narrative – is less critical than the issue of historical enquiry. If students are encouraged (as they have been since the enquiry-driven approach of the latest curriculum), to come to their own conclusions by researching, reading and evaluating a range of sources, then it matters far less what picture their teacher paints about the past. The narrative is a starting point. But the work of history students happens after that, as students examine the evidence and begin to form their own narrative.

Interestingly, some participants looked down their noses at the ‘Wikipedia generation’ of students, as if Wikipedia is not a great place to go for an introduction to most historical events or topics – check out the History of Australia page. If history students are seeing that as the be all and end all of their research, then that’s clearly a problem: whatever narrative they produce, it will not be informed by research or analysis. But the principle of starting with a coherent narrative overview is fine. (Hang on, wasn’t that the point of the whole summit?) So why be so condescending toward students?

Anyway, so I was keen to find out how the summit dealt with the issue of historical enquiry. Was the discussion of narrative content framed by recognition that students need to develop skills, and use primary sources?

Despite many mentions of historical skills, and clear recognition of the need for rich teaching resources, there was only one mention of primary sources. In the last session of the day – ten pages after afternoon tea – Inga Clendinnen said:

I want to be sure we have moved well away from the notion of learning history to doing history. We need analysis of some primary material, because you learn from doing history, not by being taught it. It is a critical discipline.

If I had been invited to the summit, I reckon I’d have uttered a hearty cheer at that point. Maybe that just confirms my position outside the ‘sensible centre’. The point is, she was immediately chastened by Gregory Melleuish:

I think what Inga said is fine if you are training a postgraduate historian who will become a professional historian. But when I look at my daughter and her friends, quite frankly, that is up in cloud-cuckoo land.

Well, if Inga is in cloud-cuckoo land, I’m right there with her. And so is Jenny Gregory, who pointed out (Inga Clendinnen persisted for a while but Gregory Melleuish was adamant):

it is very easy to present students with a set of documents about a particular event which gives different viewpoints and then give them the opportunity to analyse, to look at the evidence and come to a conclusion.

Indeed.

I could go on here. I could list a bunch of links to primary sources on the web. Or I could speculate on whether the lobbying by the museums sector and the Australian Society of Archivists (to which Geoffrey Bolton referred) had any effect. But I’d rather hear some other views. Comment, anyone?

How Web 2.0 will change history

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As an editor of archival websites, I’m interested in the tools available for historical publishing, research and interpretation. And the advent of Web 2.0 means that such tools are proliferating and becoming easier and more fun to use. Social software is making search interfaces more intuitive and clever; it is making publishing dialogic – readers can also be writers; and it is enabling many new kinds of collaborations to occur in interpreting collections.

Last month I addressed a small group at the Australian Historical Association conference in Canberra on this topic of How Web 2.0 will change history – possible futures for websites of the National Archives of Australia (PDF 312kb). The paper was framed by this mindmap I made

Mindmap of Web 2.0 and the life cycle of historiography

(inspired by other mindmaps on Web 2.0, like the one on Wikipedia).

There are plenty of exciting things the National Archives of Australia could do with these technologies, and it is starting to happen, but the path is long, resources are limited, and in some ways a cultural shift is necessary – it does not come naturally for a cultural institution to radically trust its audience.* So the paper is a bit imagin-ary. But didn’t Einstein say that imagination is more important than knowledge?

* Deep bow here to the Powerhouse Museum and its new collection interface, which you can read more about on the fresh + new blog.