Archivists on the Issues: Creating Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation: A Workshop

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following post is from Laura Alagna, Digital Preservation Librarian at Northwestern University; Keith Pendergrass, Digital Archivist at Baker Library Special Collections at Harvard Business School; Walker Sampson, Assistant Professor and Digital Archivist at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Tim Walsh, Software Developer at Artefactual Systems.

Background

In 2017, we  came together due to a shared concern over the increasing environmental impact of digital preservation. Despite some notable recent work calling attention to and investigating the environmental costs of practices in our field,^[1] we observed that most discussion of sustainable digital preservation was still focused on financial and staffing concerns, sustaining practices as a long-term program, or on the large amount of electricity used by digital storage infrastructure. Additionally, we noticed that current frameworks and standards push practitioners toward optimal digital preservation whenever resources allow, instead of providing guidance when lower levels or standards may be sufficient.

In light of these trends, we proposed a paradigm shift in digital preservation practice in our 2019 article, “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation.”^[2] Rather than focusing on strategies that simply reduce the unsustainability of current practice by improving the efficiency of the technological infrastructure we use to do our work, we argue that truly sustainable digital preservation can be achieved only when digital object management, successful use, and environmental sustainability are explicitly balanced and integrated into decision-making criteria. Suggesting a paradigm shift^[3] along these lines, we outline ways for practitioners to critically reevaluate appraisal, permanence, and availability of digital content—providing a framework for integrating environmental sustainability into digital preservation practice.

Workshop Protocol

Throughout our research and writing, we returned again and again to a driving factor behind our work: that the changes we propose can make a difference. The breadth and enormity of the climate crisis should not drive us to despair that our actions are inefficacious. When aggregated, our actions can result in significant positive change. To this end, we want to continue sharing our work in the hope that it will inspire others to implement and advocate for environmental sustainability at their own organizations. To facilitate this, we developed a workshop protocol designed for participants to discuss issues of environmental sustainability in digital preservation, identify and enact change toward sustainable practices in their organizational contexts, and identify and plan further research. The protocol is available at: https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-hxe1-m195.

BitCurator Users Forum 2019: Workshop First Run

We ran the workshop for the first time at the BitCurator Users Forum 2019 on October 24, 2019 at Yale University. We briefly introduced our article’s core arguments, set the ground rules for discussion, and split into three discussion groups based on the paradigm shift areas. Groups reported back in two sessions, with participant-created notes available here.

In the first session, we broke into three groups, each lead by a facilitator:

• Appraisal. Discussion in the appraisal group focused on collecting policies, and in particular that many participants feel that they do not have the authority to influence the appraisal process or collecting decisions. There was consensus that the low cost of storage has resulted in an reluctance to invest in staff and technological resources to conduct critical appraisal, and that reappraisal is even more difficult to accomplish.
• Permanence. Participants in this discussion group also discussed digital storage, particularly whether participants’ organizations accounted for environmental factors when implementing new (or refreshed) on-premises or cloud storage solutions. On the idea of acceptable loss, participants discussed how much loss would be acceptable at their organizations in different contexts, and how the concept could be communicated with collection curators. Those in the permanence group also compared notes on how each organization approached fixity checking, with a wide variety of practices reported among participants.
• Availability. This discussion group observed that the availability of digital content is tied to reappraisal and permanence decisions. Decisions earlier in a digital object’s life cycle have consequences for access that should be incorporated into organizations’ decision making and transparently explained to researchers. Participants discussed digitization projects in detail, particularly the issue of on-demand digitization versus mass digitization, and the lack of clear guidelines on determining what the critical mass of user need is that would move a collection or group of materials from on-demand to mass digitization.

After the general discussion on each of these areas, the three groups focused on plans for implementation, and the facilitators encouraged participants to think about actionable steps that they could take at their own organizations. A sample of these action items follows:

• Appraisal
  • Develop and implement policies for regular reappraisal.
  • Ensure that curatorial and collecting guidelines cover digital content.
  • Write preservation policies that include tiered levels of preservation so that organizations can consistently select the most appropriate level during acquisition (and communicate this to donors).
• Permanence
  • Promote collaboration with those responsible for appraisal to ensure implementations of tiered preservation solutions are meeting donor/organizational/user expectations.
  • Implement a lower tier of preservation commitment for digitized content that has a stable analog original.
  • Enact file format policies that do not migrate stable file formats.
• Availability
  • Document demand for digitization to inform preservation approaches in line with the tiers advocated for in OCLC’s 2011 Scan and Deliver
  • Develop criteria for shifting collections or groups of materials from on-demand to mass digitization, especially for audiovisual materials.
  • Investigate central or interoperable discovery systems, to avoid duplicating digitization efforts across organizations.

When the groups reported out, it became clear that there were some implementation ideas common across all three areas. Foremost among these was advocating for environmental sustainability: all three groups brainstormed ways to advocate at their own organizations, from demonstrating the need for environmentally sustainable practice to working with existing environmental initiatives. Additionally, some participants noted that having more quantifiable data on the environmental impact of digital preservation, and the positive correlation between environmentally sustainable actions with staffing and financial sustainability, would help them make the case for their action plans to their organizations’ administrators.

Next Steps

We are making the workshop protocol available so that others can run this workshop at conferences and in their local organizations and communities. Conducting the workshop at BUF2019 made it clear that participants had many areas of shared interest, and significant enthusiasm for the subject. There is ample further opportunity to learn from each other and work together to implement specific actions across organizations.

We hope that individuals and existing or newly-formed working groups will take on investigating subjects such as:

• Data and metrics on the impact of digital preservation at cultural heritage organizations.
• Strategies for advocating for sustainable digital preservation practices.
• Frameworks for gathering use statistics or user demand for digitization.
• Guidelines and policies for implementing tiered preservation approaches.

We are excited to continue working with the digital preservation community on moving toward environmentally sustainable digital preservation and look forward to seeing new research on this topic from others.

^[1] See for example Eira Tansey, “Archival Adaptation to Climate Change,” Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 11, no. 2 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2015.11908146; Benjamin Goldman, “It’s Not Easy Being Green(e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change,” in Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark Greene (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2019); and Linda Tadic, “The Environmental Impact of Digital Preservation” (presentation, Association of Moving Image Archivists conference, Portland, OR, November 18–21, 2015), updated December 2018, https://www.digitalbedrock.com/resources-2.

^[2] Keith Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh, and Laura Alagna, “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation,” American Archivist 82, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165, open access via Harvard DASH: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/40741399.

^[3] See Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (Hartland, VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999), open access via the Academy for Systems Change: http://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf; and John R. Ehrenfeld, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming Our Consumer Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

April 2, 2020November 29, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: acquisition, climate change, curators, data analysis, digital access, digital preservation, digitization, discovery, donors, Eira Tansey, environmental sustainability, Google Workspace, preservation, record storage, statistics Leave a comment

Archivists on the Issues: Rare & Ephemeral: a snapshot of full-time New England archives jobs, 2018-2019

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from Genna Duplisea, the Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Salve Regina University. Genna would like to send special thanks to Caitlin Birch, Jaimie Fritz, and Olivia Mandica-Hart for reading and commenting on this piece, and to Suzy Morgan and everyone else who gave feedback during the initial data collection phase.

 

At the university where I currently work, there is a small but enthusiastic contingent of undergraduate students in the cultural and historic preservation and history majors interested in pursuing library school. As I am asked to give a picture of the archives profession to newly-declared majors every year, I think of the inadequate job market and question whether I am advising them well. This spring, feeling disheartened by what seemed like very few job postings and a rash of term positions, I found myself wondering if the data supported my perception that there weren’t enough opportunities for all the archivists in the region.

Methodology

I compiled information on full-time archives positions in the six New England states (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) posted between April 1, 2018 and April 1, 2019. My sources were the Simmons University Jobline (http://blogs.simmons.edu/slis/jobline/), ArchivesGig (https://archivesgig.com/), and the New England Archivists and Society of American Archivists listservs.

Compiling this data required making decisions about what constituted an archives job. I included any position shared through archivist professional venues, even if it was unclear whether most archival training would be appropriate to the position. I included museum positions that related to collections care, digital collections, or other skill sets that overlap with archives training (but not positions unrelated to archives work, such as development). I included corporate positions as well as public, academic, government, or non-profit positions. A position needed to dedicate at least half of its time to archival work to be included. Temporary positions were included if those postings were full-time, as were positions that did not require a Master’s degree.

Because I began this project after many job postings had expired, some information is missing. In some cases I had to make assumptions about whether a salary grade was posted, after reviewing the institution’s general practices in job postings. (For example, I knew several larger institutions (such as Harvard and Yale Universities) always post salary grades; conversely, if a review of an institution’s current positions generally did not include salary information, then I assumed that there had not been any in the post I was researching.) Future research would be more effective if job posting information were to be downloaded and recorded as it is posted, so that original postings can serve as reference points and more information can be gathered before the removal of inactive positions from job boards.

This study is a snapshot of a year in the New England archives profession, allowing for some broad conclusions rather than a statistically significant analysis. Undoubtedly, I have still missed a few, but positions I hope to draw useful conclusions from the data. The full table is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YglMlu_SOIUXyknVzTvxiJSj_VC9v-Pb/view?usp=sharing.

The survey found 115 full-time archives jobs at institutions within the six New England states posted between April 1, 2018 and April 1, 2019.

Salary information

Most of the job postings did not include any salary information at all, whether a flat number, a grade, or a range. Of the 115 total positions, posting information was insufficient in 30 of them and it was impossible to tell whether salary information had originally been present. Of the remaining 85 positions, 47 (55.3%) included salary information, and 38 (44.7%) did not.

If we exclude Harvard and Yale, the two largest employers in this survey, then the salary information becomes paltry — only 17 positions at other institutions included salary information. There was not enough information on salary amounts to conclude anything substantial.

Location

Of the 115 positions, 30 of them (26%) were at Harvard or Yale Universities, meaning that over a quarter of all archives jobs posted in New England last year were at one of those institutions. The state with the highest number of postings was Massachusetts with 73 (63.4%). Connecticut had 25 (21.7%) postings, and Rhode Island had nine (8%). Vermont and Maine each had three postings (2.6% each) for the entire year, and New Hampshire had two (1.7%).

Temporary & Contingent Positions

The permanency of 11 positions was unclear. Of the remaining 104 positions, 72 (69.2%) were permanent. The rest were temporary positions, with terms ranging from two months to five years but mostly appointments lasting less than two years.

The value of the MS or MSLIS

Of the 115 positions, it was unclear in 25 of them whether a Master’s degree was required. Of the remaining 90, 61 (67.7%) required a Master’s or higher (one position required a Ph. D). Twenty-nine positions (27.7%) did not require it, and of those, 12 positions did not require a Master’s but preferred it.

Archives grads

For context, I was interested in finding out how many new archivists there were every year. The only archives management degree in an ALA-accredited LIS program in the New England region is at Simmons University in Boston. The Simmons University Office of Institutional Research provided information regarding the number of graduates with the archives management concentration. This includes graduates who earned the concentration in-person or online, and also includes graduates who pursued the dual-Master’s MS/MA program in Archives Management and History. (I myself am a graduate of this program.) Of course, not all archivists have Master’s degrees; not all Simmons University graduates stay in the region; not all archives graduates seek jobs in the archives field; and not all archivists in New England went to Simmons. The University of Rhode Island also has a library school (though not an archives-focused degree), and there are several public history Master’s programs in the region; all of these, as well as online programs, also train area professionals who work in archives, but the number of archivist graduates would be more difficult to track. Still, Simmons’s data provides an idea of how many new archivists enter the job market in the region annually.

Graph created by the author using data from the Simmons University Office of Institutional Research.

For the past ten years, the annual number of Simmons archives graduates has more than doubled, from 56 in 2008 to 121 in 2017. (The latest figure for archives degrees awarded in academic year 2018-2019 is 38, but this does not include the 2019 spring semester.) The increase has not been steady, with a drop between 2012 and 2014, but the program has consistently grown since then. The online program began awarding degrees in 2014, and represents a substantial minority of those degrees. All told, 872 professionals have graduated with archives degrees from Simmons in the past decade.

Discussion

It does not seem that the job market in New England is supporting the influx of new graduates, or emerging and seasoned professionals. The exponential annual increase of digital information alone means, in my view, that society needs more archivists. A separate but related conversation with current archivists would surely conclude that people in this profession are overworked and understaffed, with job responsibilities ranging from processing to digitization to records management to teaching to digital preservation.

The Society of Southwest Archivists (SSA) has demonstrated concern for a dearth of salary information and low pay. SSA President Mark Lambert has published a series on the failure of national organizations and top archives directors are failing the profession (https://www.southwestarchivists.org/poor-pay-in-archives-how-top-archives-directors-and-our-national-organizations-are-failing-us/). Lack of transparency about archivist salaries allows institutions to avoid providing competitive compensation, and can generate huge wastes of time for candidates and hiring committees when applicants do not know whether a position will compensate them adequately. Last fall, SSA began collecting regional salary data (https://www.southwestarchivists.org/home/archives-regional-salary-research/). At its spring 2019 meeting, the Society of Southwest Archivists voted to stop posting or sharing job advertisements that did not include salary information (https://www.southwestarchivists.org/salary-information-now-required-in-job-postings/). As of this writing, a group of archivists is collecting information for a proposal to SAA Council to require the organization to require salaries in job postings (https://harvard.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_efCj42MurbrLAj3), and New England Archivists is considering a similar change. More regional and national organizations, not to mention library schools, could make similar statements and take action to support its communities of learners and professionals.

It has been a decade and a half since the Society of American Archivists conducted A*CENSUS (Archival Census and Education Needs Survey in the United States), which revealed trends about the archival profession and archival education. The SAA annual meeting this year includes a task force on A*CENSUS II. Pre-planning for the survey will be complete by early 2020, with the Committee on Research, Data, and Assessment (CoRDA) implementing it thereafter. (https://www2.archivists.org/news/2018/saa-council-affirms-strategic-goals-creates-research-committee)

The frequency of temporary and project postings demonstrates how dependent the archives profession is on external or limited funding. It is alarming that nearly a third of the archives positions posted last year were term-limited. I focused on full-time positions because I wanted to get a grasp on the types of positions people graduating from archives programs ideally want — secure, full-time, in a relevant field. Yet even this set of supposedly ideal positions show that job insecurity prevails. Professional organizations have a role to play in supporting the creation of stable, benefited, appropriately-compensated positions for its members. New England Archivists supported a study on contingent employment, released in January 2017 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aFVWuA6zJsrTGFoPuKeU8K6SJ1Sggv2h/view). In response to the UCLA Special Collections Librarians open letter on contingent employment published in June 2018, NEA released a statement later that year (https://www.newenglandarchivists.org/Official-Statements/6814976).

A trend of precarious stewardship threatens archival collections, to say nothing of the impact on individuals struggling for economic stability. Eira Tansey’s recent May Day blog post pointed out that the best way to protect collections is to secure stable, ongoing support for staff (http://eiratansey.com/2018/05/01/mayday-on-may-day/). Yet the inadequate number of new positions, combined with the trends of salary secrecy and contingent positions, seem to demonstrate that archives are not valued as core functions necessitating ongoing operational funding within an organization. If the collections that archivists steward have enduring value to their institutions, then the staff should experience similar value and respect for their work.

 

 

May 28, 2019November 29, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the Issues, Research PostTags: A*CENSUS, archival processing, archives profession, digital preservation, digitization, Eira Tansey, fair compensation, Google Workspace, job security, library degrees, library school, new professionals, precarity, preservation, public history, SAA, surveys, temporary labor 5 Comments

Steering Share: Vice Chair Courtney Dean

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This kick-off post comes from I&A Vice Chair/Chair Elect Courtney Dean, a Project Archivist at the University of California at Los Angeles Library Special Collections.

I&A Vice Chair Courtney Dean

1. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOUR JOB OR THE ARCHIVES PROFESSION?

In my current position at UCLA Library Special Collections, I oversee the day-to-day operations of the Center for Primary Research and Training (CFPRT), an innovative program which pairs graduate students from across campus with special collections projects in their field of expertise. I give the CFPRT scholars a crash course on archival theory, and train them in arrangement, description, and preservation best practices. Often times it’s the first interaction they’ve had with primary sources, and it’s thrilling to watch them realize their projects and hear how their experience in Special Collections directly affects their own research. Aside from the students, I love the strong community of practice among the archivists I work with. We hold informal study groups to expand our skillsets in things like RDA, XML, and born-digital archives. It’s exciting to be constantly learning and surrounded by such smart and passionate colleagues. Finally (last thing!) I’m inspired by the meaningful conversations about issues like transparency, ethics, and privilege that are happening within my unit.

2. WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO JOIN THE I&A STEERING COMMITTEE?

I’m heavily involved in a local professional organization in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Archivists Collective (LAAC), which I co-founded with some friends of mine a few years ago, and I really enjoy directly interacting with local archivists, archives, and communities. After the recent presidential election though, I felt like I wanted to step up and do more in terms of national advocacy for things like IMLS, NEH, and NEA funding, and raising awareness about the importance of archives in general. I’ve also long admired I&A efforts to spotlight issues like neutrality, climate and environmental data, and #ArchivesSoWhite, which was another big motivating factor for my involvement. I served on one of the News Monitoring teams last year, but this is my first year on the Steering Committee.

3. WHAT IS AN ARCHIVAL ISSUE THAT MEANS A LOT TO YOU?

There are so many issues! As Rachel mentioned, a focus on digital preservation is absolutely essential. Not only does inaction put our existing collections at risk, but bigger issues of government accountability and an inclusive historical record are at stake. I come from a community-oriented service background (in my prior career I worked in community mental health) so issues of accessibility, inclusiveness, and historical silences are also of utmost importance to me. I’m heartened that the profession is finally beginning to acknowledge systemic oppressions and the implications for our collections, access and use, scholarship, collective memory, and the makeup of the field itself. Of course we still have a long, long way to go! Lastly, an issue near and dear to me is the (over)reliance on temp workers in our field. I’ll save that for another post though!

October 6, 2017November 24, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Interviews, Steering ShareTags: #ArchivesSoWhite, archival description, archival silences, archival theory, archives profession, arrangement, born-digital records, climate change, digital archives, digital preservation, environmental data, IMLS, Interviews, lobbying, memory institutions, mental health, net neutrality, precarity, professionalism, Whiteness 1 Comment

Steering Share: Chair Rachel Mandell

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This kick-off post comes from I&A Chair Rachel Mandell, Metadata Librarian at the University of Southern California Digital Library.

I&A Chair Rachel Mandell

1. What is your favorite thing about your job or the archives profession?

My favorite thing about my current position is that I get to work with both digital and analog archival materials at the same time. As a Metadata Librarian in USC’s Digital Library, I am tasked with describing archival materials in a digital environment. I often use the original document, photograph, etc., to assist my description of the digital surrogate, in addition to spending my days toiling with spreadsheets, troubleshooting imports, and tinkering with file size and resolution. By working with both new and old technology, I retain what motivated me to join the archives profession in the first place – the tactile, tangible handling of historically and culturally important artifacts – while also staying up-to-date on relevant library and scholarly information trends and practices.

2. What made you want to join the I&A Steering Committee?

This year will be my third full year serving in some capacity with the I&A Steering Committee. Two years ago, I began as the Issues and Advocacy intern, working on ways to improve the Issues and Advocacy Toolkit. At the time, I was working as a grant-funded Project Archivist and found it very difficult to acquire the institutional support to pursue professional development opportunities outside of my current position. As my internship year came to a close, I found myself really enjoying working with the Issues and Advocacy Steering Committee. I had learned so much more about the inner-workings of SAA and also met a lot of people beyond my regional archival groups and local organizations. I decided to run for Vice Chair/Chair-elect. I was ready to take on a leadership role, as I had also secured myself a permanent faculty position so I had more institutional support and time to pursue volunteer positions. This year, I am so excited to step into the role of Chair. In today’s political climate, our section is more valuable than ever, as we raise awareness, engage with difficult and perhaps controversial issues, and do our part to strengthen the archives profession.  

3. What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?

The commitment to digital preservation. As digital technology/tools continue to advance and develop, we as archivists need to remember that digital ≠ forever. The commitment to perpetuity needs to be explicit in every new tool and every new digital surrogate that we create. For example, a new digital publishing platform called Scalar, developed here at USC, aims to transform scholarly communication into something more interactive, non-linear, and born-digital. This tool is beginning to gain traction, as students are even beginning to use it to publish their theses and dissertations. However, a known issue with Scalar is that there is no explicit commitment or workflow dedicated to the preservation of these projects. The ability to embed media is exciting, but there is no way to ensure the links don’t fall victim to link-rot. The Scalar environment provides innovative ways of interacting with research and scholarship, but there is no assurance that this environment will exist forever. I have no doubt that there are answers to some of these questions, but as we in the archives profession move forward with the creation and use digital technologies, I would like to see this issue of preservation built in to new tools of all kinds and not only considered after content has been created.

September 25, 2017November 24, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Interviews, Steering ShareTags: Advocacy Toolkit, archival description, archival labor, archives profession, born-digital records, digital access, digital preservation, grants, internships, Interviews, professionalism, SAA, technology, volunteering 1 Comment

ICYMI: Archives Association of Ontario Annual Meeting 2017

Our ICYMI series provide summaries of presentations, publications, webinars, and other educational opportunities that are of interest to I&A members. If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com. The following is from Sara Janes, University Archivist for Lakehead University, Ontario.

The 2017 conference of the Archives Association of Ontario was held on the University of Toronto Campus, April 26-28. The theme, “Come Together: Meaningful Collaboration in a Connected World,” felt relevant to the participants as we discussed ways to work with each other and with the public to better support archives and communities across the province.

Focus on decolonization and Indigenous issues

Decolonization and indigenous issues were a significant theme, particularly as archives are beginning to respond to the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and are engaging with Canada 150 celebrations. In one plenary session, Michael Etherington, of the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, spoke about those calls to action, and the frequent disconnect between colonial institutions and Indigenous people and communities; in the other, Raymond Frogner, Director of Archives at University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, spoke about the impact of Indigenous thinkers such as George Hunt on archival theory and practices.

Responses to the TRC, engaging with Canada’s colonial past and present, and social justice issues were well represented throughout the conference, and these themes were often tied in with discussions around acquisition, archival management, and digital outreach, as well as working groups formed within various organizations.

Focus on collaboration and partnerships

Other presentations highlighted collaboration and cooperation between institutions. Papers touched on: collaboration for acquisition and collection development, appraisal of government records, sharing resources for digital preservation, teaching courses using archival material, online outreach and collaborative exhibits, and the work of student and young professional organizations. Overall, the program was excellent, and attendees found it difficult to choose between sessions.

Talks were also held on the past, present, and future of the Archives Association of Ontario, giving members a chance to learn more about how this organization has been shaped over the years and its plans for the future. In particular, this included a report on the first year of the Provincial Acquisition Strategy, and feedback on how to continue building cooperation between archival institutions in the province.

Other highlights

The formal side of the conference was supported by a variety of other opportunities for socializing, networking, and learning. Four archives tours were held: to the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and University of Toronto Archives, and the John M. Kelly Library Conservation Studio. The opening reception was held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and attendees had many opportunities to catch up with each other during breaks and at pub nights.

The Banquet, held at Hart House, celebrated 20 years of the Archives and Records Management program at the University of Toronto iSchool. The Awards Lunch was held at at the Faculty Club, and honoured Suzanne Dubeau, Nick Ruest, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Hastings County Historical Society.

Many of the conference presentations have been posted online, and a Storify is also available.

 

Sara Janes is University Archivist for Lakehead University. She has an MLIS from McGill University, and has worked in archives and records management for ten years, with a focus on digital records issues, outreach, and education.

 

May 26, 2017June 24, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: ICYMITags: acquisition, appraisal, archival theory, collection development, cultural competence, cultural heritage, decolonizing archives, digital preservation, Indigenous people, institutional records, library school, new professionals, outreach, selection, students 1 Comment

Research Post: The Evolving Landscape of Collecting Protest Material, Part 2

I&A Research Teams are groups of dedicated volunteers who monitor breaking news and delve into ongoing topics affecting archives and the archival profession. Under the leadership of the I&A Steering Committee, the Research Teams compile their findings into Research Posts. Each post offers a summary and coverage of an issue. This post, part two of a two-part series, comes from the General News Media Research Team, which monitors the news for issues affecting archivists and archives.

Please be aware that the sources cited have not been vetted and do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Section.

 

In the first part of this two-part series, we discussed digital, social media, and other online materials that can be collected to form archives. Forming bodies of these digital artifacts carries legal consequences and privacy issues for the folks whose information is collected, but such work also has issues around narrative and interpretation. Below are two lists: one is a list of projects and tools that use social media and online materials in documenting history, and the other is a bibliography where the work as well as its related issues are discussed.

Projects and tools

• A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland. Digital repository that “collects, preserves, and shares the stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by Cleveland citizens.” Partnership between Cleveland residents and professional archivists.
• Baltimore Uprising 2015 Archive Project. Digital repository “that seeks to preserve and make accessible original content that was captured and created by individual community members, grassroots organizations, and witnesses to the protests that followed the death of Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015.” This is a collaborative project of Maryland Historical Society, university faculty, museums and community orgs.
• DocNow. “Tool and a community developed around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content.”
• Documenting Ferguson. Project of Washington University St. Louis. “Freely available resource that seeks to preserve and make accessible the digital media captured and created by community members following the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.”

• Internet Archive collections
  • Occupy Wall Street, Women’s March
  • Archive-It Global Events. “These collections of global events have been created by the Archive-It team in conjunction with curators and subject matter experts from institutions around the world.”
• Mukurtu
  “Free, mobile, and open source platform built with indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage.”

• Trump Protest Archive. “Self funded digital repository, collecting [photographs of] items of material culture from protest events relating to the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump and the early part of his administration.”

• Witness. “WITNESS trains and supports activists and citizens around the world to use video safely, ethically, and effectively to expose human rights abuse and fight for human rights change.”
  • How to film a protest series.
  • Resources by topic
  • Archives and Our Ethical Guidelines

List of further readings

• Ashenfelder, Mike. “Activist Archivists and Digital Preservation | The Signal.” Webpage, October 1, 2012. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/10/activist-archivists-and-digital-preservation/
• Dash, Anil. “What Is Public? — The Message.” Medium, July 24, 2014. https://medium.com/message/what-is-public-f33b16d780f9#.a41l7wva1
• DM, Alexandra. “Design for Social Good.” Documenting DocNow, October 12, 2016. https://news.docnow.io/design-for-social-good-aa5503dcbef2
• “Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Provided Data Access for a Surveillance Product Marketed to Target Activists of Color.” ACLU of Northern California. Accessed March 15, 2017. https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed-target
• Hirschbiel, M. Catherine. “Libraries Preserve Protest Posters.” Library Journal. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2017/02/academic-libraries/libraries-preserve-protest-posters/
• Jules, Bergis. “Some Thoughts on Ethics and DocNow.” Documenting DocNow, June 3, 2016. https://news.docnow.io/some-thoughts-on-ethics-and-docnow-d19cfec427f2
• Jules, Bergis. “Surveillance and Social Media Archiving.” Documenting DocNow, October 4, 2016. https://news.docnow.io/surveillance-and-social-media-archiving-7ea21b77b807
• McNealy, Jasmine. “Privacy Implications of Digital Preservation: Social Media Archives and the Social Networks Theory of Privacy, The.” Elon Law Review 3 (2012 2011): 133.
• “Occupy Wall Street: From the Streets to the Archives” The New York Times. Accessed March 15, 2017. https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/occupy-wall-street-from-the-streets-to-the-archives/?_r=1
• Ruest, Nick. “Exploring #WomensMarch.” On Archivy, February 10, 2017. https://medium.com/on-archivy/exploring-womensmarch-dcc30221101c#.n5xzabip3
• Summers, Ed. “An Invitation to Study Ferguson.” On Archivy. December 3, 2014. https://medium.com/on-archivy/an-invitation-to-study-ferguson-367b423cff29#.y41hz5q25
• Summers, Ed. “On Forgetting and Hydration.” On Archivy. November 18, 2014. https://medium.com/on-archivy/on-forgetting-e01a2b95272#.y6knu0fk3
• Zimmer, Michael. “Is It Ethical to Harvest Public Twitter Accounts Without Consent?” MichaelZimmer.org. February 12, 2010. http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2010/02/12/is-it-ethical-to-harvest-public-twitter-accounts-without-consent/

This post is courtesy of the General News Media Research Team, and in particular Courtney Dean and Lori Dedeyan. The General News Media Team is: Courtney Dean, Lori Dedeyan, Audrey Lengel, Sean McConnell, and Daria Labinsky, team leader.

If you are aware of an issue that might benefit from a Research Post, please get in touch with us: archivesissues@gmail.com.

April 11, 2017June 23, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Research PostTags: A People’s Archive of Police Violence, ACLU, archives profession, curators, digital preservation, Documenting the Now, historical interpretation, Internet Archive, preservation, privacy, racial oppression, Research Teams, social justice, social media, state violence, web archiving Leave a comment

Police-Worn Body Camera Footage: A Public Record? Part 1

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com. Please note that opinions expressed in Archivists on the Issues posts do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable.

This post, written by Rachel Mattson, is part one in a two-part series regarding the debate regarding police body-camera footage’s classification as a public record. Part 2 is now available here.

Introduction
The murder of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 was, we now know, a turning point in the struggle for racial justice and police accountability in the U.S. Protests in the shooting’s aftermath garnered international news attention and extended the work of racial justice activists under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement. The horror of Brown’s death and the power of the highly visible oppositional efforts in its aftermath put conversations about police procedure and accountability front and center nationally.

One of the chief reforms proposed in the wake of these events was implementation of police-worn body cameras. After Brown’s murder, officers in Ferguson began routinely using these devices, and in December 2014, President Obama officially requested $75 million in federal funds to support the distribution of 50,000 body cameras to police departments nationwide. Shortly thereafter, The Atlantic called the adoption of body-worn cameras by municipal police departments “may[be] the most significant reform to follow the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown.” The trend has continued: in March 2016, New York-based legal researcher Ian Head noted that “cameras are the biggest trend in police departments across the country.”[1]

But even as calls for use of police-worn body cameras grew, critics began to sound notes of caution. Privacy experts voiced concerns that “equipping police with such devices” might simply extend the government’s surveillance capacity: the Los Angeles Times reported that someday “such cameras…may be used with facial-recognition technology the way many departments already use license-plate scanners.” Others noted that ample evidence suggested that video documentation was not enough to ensure accountability or justice. New York Times Magazine contributor Jenna Wortham tweeted, “Eric Garner’s death WAS captured on video. We all saw it. Body cameras for cops won’t solve this problem. It’s bigger than technology.”[2] She refers to the Staten Island man who was choked to death by an NYPD officer in July 2014. A grand jury failed to indict the officer responsible.

Body-worn cameras (BWCs for short) began raising a range of legal and archival questions that municipalities and police departments were woefully underprepared to address. Should footage generated by police-worn body cameras be classified as a public record? When and how should access be granted to family members, journalists, lawyers, activists, researchers, and other interested parties? How can officials protect the privacy of individuals whose lives, and homes, are caught on video? What strategies should be used to ensure the integrity of the digital files generated by BWCs? What kinds of retention policies should determine the disposition of the deluge of new, ever-increasing video records? In the rush to put cameras on bodies, these questions had been largely overlooked: a federal survey of 63 law enforcement agencies using body cameras found that as of mid-2014, nearly a third had no written policy to govern their use.[3] This has improved some in the intervening years: according to a study by The Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, as of August 2016, 42 of major city police departments 68 (roughly 62%) have BWC policies in place.[4]

But a raft of issues remain, even when agencies have established policies. For instance, studies have found that most of the existing BWC policies are vague or arbitrary on questions related to the preservation of and public access to video captured by police BWCs.[5] Many cities permit or mandate the destruction of footage between 30 days and six months after filming, unless the video depicts “excessive use of force, detention, or civilian complaints” or has “evidentiary, exculpatory, or training value.” Just who makes this determination—and on what basis—remains unclear. Moreover, the majority of BWC policies make it, in researcher Ian Head’s words, “extremely difficult for anyone but the local prosecutor’s office to access the recordings, even though the cameras are being touted by the Department of Justice as a way for police to ‘demonstrate transparency to their communities.’”[6]

Journalists, government sunshine advocates, and racial justice activists have all sounded the alarm about the inadequacy, arbitrariness, and lack of standards governing BWC policies nationwide.[7] But the voice of one important group has largely been missing from these debates: archivists. And the truth is that a great many of the central challenges of BWC policies and practices are core archival topics. At issue here are questions about digital preservation workflows, access policies, privacy concerns, and records retention schedules—questions that professional archivists and records managers address on a daily basis. Our experience with these questions and our longstanding efforts to resolve them in ethical, effective ways, makes our perspectives essential to ongoing conversations about the development of policies and practices related to BWCs.

Archivists and BWCs
Some efforts are now being made to involve archivists, and archival perspectives, in these conversations. For instance, in August 2016, the UCLA Department of Information Studies hosted a three-day forum called “On the Record, All the Time: Setting an Agenda for Audiovisual Evidence Management.” Funded by an IMLS grant and spearheaded by moving image archives scholar and educator Snowden Becker, the convening was designed to create an “action plan for curricula and educational programs that will better prepare information professionals to manage” materials “generated by the widespread use of surveillance cameras, smartphones, and bodycam.”[8]

But in consideration of how widespread the use of BWCs has become—and the enormous records management questions they pose—one archival initiative is hardly enough. As trained professionals, we have a responsibility to add our multiple voices to the conversation.

One node of this conversation that stands to benefit from the thoughtful archivist’s perspective is the access node. Journalists, lawyers, and watchdog groups have argued that BWC footage falls squarely into the category of public records.[9] Although public records laws vary from locality to locality, nearly every state’s definition of a public record includes “information stored in a variety of media” including video produced by government agencies. For instance, the Florida state law defines as public records any material (“regardless of the physical form, characteristics, or means of transmission”) that is “made or received pursuant to law or ordinance or in connection with the transaction of official business by any agency.” As material created in connection with the transaction of official business of police, BWC footage is clearly a public record in Florida. As such, the law mandates that the agency responsible for that record must make it available “for personal inspection and copying by any person.” And yet, many requestors have had trouble gaining access to police BWC footage in Florida. In early 2015, for instance, officials in Sarasota charged one records requestor $18,000 for fees associated with processing 84 hours of video—an action that had the effect of forcing the requestor to retract his application to view the materials.[10]

Rachel Mattson is a Brooklyn-based historian and archivist. She currently works as the Manager of Special Projects in the Archives of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and is a core member of the XFR Collective. She previously volunteered for I-Witness Video, a group that used citizen video and archival strategies to oppose police misconduct. Mattson holds a PhD in U.S. History from NYU and an MLIS from UIUC. Her writing has appeared in publications including Radical History Review, the Scholar and the Feminist, Movement Research Performance Journal, and in books published by Routledge, Washington Square, and Thread Makes Blanket Press.

Citations
[1] “Ferguson Cops Get Body Cameras After Michael Brown’s Shooting,” NBC News Online, September 1, 2014; Uri Friedman, “Do Police Body Cameras Actually Work?” The Atlantic, December 3, 2014; Ian Head, “Rush to Body Cameras Does Little to Create Police Accountability,” The Daily Outrage: The CCR Blog, March 9, 2016.
[2] Matt Pearce, “Growing Use of Police Body Cameras Raises Privacy Concerns,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 27, 2014. Wortham, who tweets at @jennydeluxe, is quoted in the LA Times article. See also, e.g., Janaé Bonsu, “The Movement for Black Lives Will not be Criminalized,” Institute for Policy Studies, July 18, 2016, ips-dc.org/movement-black-lives-will-not-criminalized/
[3] Cited in Pearce, “Growing Use of Police Body Cameras Raises Privacy Concerns.” The full report can be downloaded from justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/472014912134715246869.pdf
[4] The Leadership Council on Human Rights and Upturn, Police Body Worn Cameras: A Policy Scorecard (2016), bwcscorecard.org.
[5] Campaign Zero, “Police Use of Force Review,”joincampaignzero.org/reports/.
[6] Police Body Worn Cameras: A Policy Scorecard (2016); Campaign Zero, “Police Use of Force Review”; Head, “Rush to Body Cameras Does Little to Create Police Accountability.”
[7]See, for instance, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Civil Rights’ May 2015 press release, “Privacy, and Media Rights Groups Release Principles for Law Enforcement Body Worn Cameras.” http://www.civilrights.org/press/2015/body-camera-principles.html
[8] “On the Record, All the Time,” is.gseis.ucla.edu/bodycams; Project Proposal: “On the Record, All the Time,” imls.gov/sites/default/files/re-43-16-0053-16_proposal_documents.pdf. Attendees live-tweeted some parts of this convening using the hashtag #OTRATT.
[9] For instance, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) recently submitted an amicus brief in an Ohio case related to the shooting of Samuel DuBose by a police officer, in which it “argues that bodycam videos are not confidential law enforcement records under Ohio Public Records Act and accordingly must be released upon request.” To read the brief, visit rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/briefs-comments/cincinnati-enquirer-v-deters.
[10] The 2016 Florida Statutes: leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0100-0199/0119/0119.html; James L. Rosica, “Police Body Cameras Could Conflict with Florida Public Records Law,” Tampa Bay Times, March 15, 2015. Although charging fees do not technically violate the public records laws, they do make it virtually impossible for most journalists or watchdog organizations to access these records. The practice of charging excessive fees for processing public records requests is an alarmingly common one. It gained new visibility when, in the aftermath of Mike Brown’s murder, several newspapers were charged “exorbitant fees” by officials in Ferguson to news organizations requesting documents. At one point, local agencies in Ferguson billed the Associated Press for 8 hours of work at $135 per hour—“merely to retrieve a handful of email accounts since the shooting.” Andy Cush, “Ferguson is Gouging Journalists in Freedom of Information Requests,” Gawker, September 29, 2014. In an attempt to mitigate this challenge, the Obama administration recently included, in an updated FOIA law, a provision that would prohibit agencies from charging processing fees if they fail to respond in 30 days, Jason Leopold, “Obama Just Made it Much Easier for the Public to Access Public Records,” Vice News June 30, 2016.

 

October 10, 2016June 23, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: archival processing, archives profession, detention and arrest, digital cameras, digital preservation, grants, IMLS, professionalism, public records laws, record destruction, social justice 7 Comments

Research Post: Personal Archiving and Empowerment

I&A Research Teams are groups of dedicated volunteers who monitor breaking news and delve into ongoing topics affecting archives and the archival profession. Under the leadership of the I&A Steering Committee, the Research Teams compile their findings into Research Posts for the I&A blog. Each Research Post offers a summary and coverage of an issue. This Research Post comes from the General News Media Research Team, which monitors news media for issues related to archives.

Please be aware that the sources cited have not been vetted and do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable.

SUMMARY OF THE ISSUE

Personal archiving has been an increasingly common topic among library and archives professionals. Digital preservation, defined broadly, has received fairly frequent coverage in mainstream media outlets recently as well. As personal records are created more frequently in digital environments, public concern for the preservation of born-digital personal archives becomes increasingly pervasive. (1) The term “personal archiving” is itself an interesting one, particularly when positioned within communities of professional archivists. It may gesture toward a shift in attention from working with collections at inactive stages in their lifecycles and providing access to researchers, to educating the public to be informed custodians of their own records, with intervention beginning much earlier in the record lifecycle. Librarians and archivists are increasingly relied upon to provide education and training to the public, empowering individuals to take control of the long-term maintenance and preservation of their own records, digital or otherwise.

Articles in popular media intended for a general audience reflect a widespread concern—and in some cases, panic—about the preservation of digital records, from personal documents or photographs stored on computer hard drives to blogs and files stored in the cloud. It has been noted that these articles rarely interview archivists or other professionals engaged in this very work. (2)

Of course, within professional literature and practice, much work has been devoted to exploring the roles that information professionals can (and do) play in working with the public on the organization and preservation of personal, family, and community records. (3)

At the same time, much has also been written recently on the (often lack of) diversity represented both in archival collections and in the profession itself. In addition to responding to concerns about digital preservation and the “digital black hole,” personal archiving outreach initiatives have the potential to address this scarcity of diverse representations in the historical record. (4)(5) But in order to do so, archivists and librarians must expand outreach efforts to include their complete communities. Who is included in personal archiving education and conversation? In the instance of a public program, archivists and librarians might treat this statistically and ask if those in attendance constitute a representative sample of the population of the community in which the hosting organization is situated.

This outreach may also potentially include pitching more articles to popular publications to counteract those in which archival work is largely invisible. It might also include cooperative efforts, both large- and small-scale, between members of the profession and personal archivists in sharing information, expertise, and resources. As community members themselves, archivists and librarians might consider how they are reaching their constituents, and how they are empowering their complete communities to work with them to preserve community histories, independently or as collaborators.

An additional key issue here involves differing uses of the term “archivist.” Who is included in the phrase “members of the archival community”? Does it include so-called “citizen archivists,” or is the title of “archivist” reserved for qualified and employed professionals? If the latter, are archivists and librarians denying themselves the value of experience provided by amateur collectors? These are questions archivists and librarians face when discussing the future of their professional identities and their relationships with their publics and community partners.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF COVERAGE OF THE ISSUE:

Sources cited:

(1) Weiner, Eric. “Will Future Historians Consider These Days the Digital Dark Ages?” On the Media (January 4, 2016). http://www.npr.org/2016/01/04/461878724/will-future-historians-consider-these-times-the-digital-dark-ages

(2) Lyons, Bertram. “There Will Be No Digital Dark Age.” Issues and Advocacy Blog (May 11, 2016). https://issuesandadvocacy.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/there-will-be-no-digital-dark-age

(3) Personal Digital Archiving 2016 conference schedule. http://www.lib.umich.edu/pda2016

(4) Mass Memories Road Show. http://openarchives.umb.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15774coll6

(5) The Memory Lab at DC Public Library. http://www.dclibrary.org/labs/memorylab

Additional sources:

Ashenfelder, Mike, “Personal Archiving in the Cloud,” in National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, Library of Congress, Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving (Library of Congress: Washington, D.C., 2013): 21. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/documents/ebookpdf_march18.pdf

Becker, Devin and Collier Nogues, “Saving-Over, Over-Saving, and the Future Mess of Writers’ Digital Archives: A Survey Report on the Personal Digital Archiving Practices of Emerging Writers.” The American Archivist 75:2 (Fall/Winter 2012): 509. http://americanarchivist.org/doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.75.2.t024180533382067

Brown, Nathan, “Helping Members of the Community Manage Their Digital Lives: Developing a Personal Digital Archiving Workshop.” D-Lib Magazine 21:5/6 (May/June 2015). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may15/brown/05brown.html

Cushing, Amber L., “Highlighting the Archives Perspective in the Personal Digital Archiving Discussion,” Library Hi Tech 28:2 (2010): 305. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07378831011047695

Drake, Jarrett. “Expanding #ArchivesForBlackLives to Traditional Archival Repositories” (June 27, 2016). https://medium.com/on-archivy/expanding-archivesforblacklives-to-traditional-archival-repositories-b88641e2daf6#.20feffxdh

LaFrance, Adrienne. “Raiders of the lost web.” The Atlantic (October 14, 2015). http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/

Marshall, Catherine, “Challenges and Opportunities for Personal Digital Archiving,” in I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era, Christopher Lee, ed., (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2011): 97. http://saa.archivists.org/store/i-digital-personal-collections-in-the-digital-era/2217/

Marshall, Catherine C., “Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving: Part 1.” D-Lib Magazine 14 (March/April 2008). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/marshall/03marshall-pt1.html

Marshall, Catherine, Sara Bly, and Francoise Brun-Cottan, “The Long-Term Fate of Our Personal Digital Belongings: Toward a Service Model for Personal Archives,” in Proceedings of Archiving (Ottawa: Society of Imaging Science and Technology, 2006): 25.

Pardes, Arielle. “How digital storage is changing the way we preserve history.” Vice (February 19, 2016). http://www.vice.com/read/how-digital-storage-is-changing-the-way-we-preserve-history

Redwine, Gabriela, Personal Digital Archiving (Great Britain: Digital Preservation Coalition, 2015): 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr15-01

Soleau, Teresa. “Preventing digital decay.” The Iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty (October 20, 2014). http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/preventing-digital-decay/

Strausheim, Carl. “Preventing a digital dark age.” Inside Higher Ed (March 10, 2016). https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/10/researchers-build-preservation-ecosystem-avert-digital-dark-age

Winsborough, Dave; Lovric, Darko; Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. “Personality, Privacy, and Our Digital Selves.” The Guardian (July 18, 2016). https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2016/jul/18/personality-privacy-digital-selves

Wortham, Jenna. “How an archive of the internet could change history.” The New York Times (June 21, 2016). http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/magazine/how-an-archive-of-the-internet-could-change-history.html?_r=0

The I&A Steering Committee would like to thank the General News Media Research Team, and in particular, Chelsea Gunn, for writing this post.

The General News Media Research Team is:

Jeremy Brett, Leader
Anna Trammell
Daria Labinsky
Chelsea Gunn
Meghan Kennedy

If you are aware of an issue that might benefit from a Research Post, please get in touch with us: archivesissues@gmail.com.

July 28, 2016June 23, 2022 by wendyhagenmaier Categories: Research PostTags: archives profession, born-digital records, digital archives, Digital Dark Age, digital preservation, outreach, personal archives, professionalism, record storage, Research Teams, The Right to Be Forgotten, web archiving Leave a comment

Institutional Silences and the Digital Dark Age

The post below was first published on The Schedule, the blog for SAA’s Records and Management Roundtable (RMRT) on May 23, 2016. In it, RMRT Steering Committee Member, Eira Tansey, responds to Bertram Lyons’ Archivists on the Issues post, There Will Be No Digital Dark Age. Many thanks to Eira Tansey and the RMRT Steering Committee for allowing us to repost this response.

Over on the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable blog, Bert Lyons recently wrote a post titled “There Will Be No Digital Dark Age”. I loved this piece, since it touches on two of my favorite hobby horses: the erasure of archival labor from public discourse, and re-asserting the value of professional archival labor for a problem that routinely vexes the general public (in this case, degradation of digital cultural heritage).

Bert recalls a recent NPR article covering one of the common fears of our age, that of an impending digital dark age. He left a comment on the article noting that the story left out a critical component — the work that archivists and other information professionals have been engaged in for some time so that we don’t lose all of our digital heritage, culture, records, and information to the great intertubez quicksands. He states, “We are not and have not been absent from the digital preservation questions. We are, however, hidden in the public narrative” and goes on to stress that appraisal and selection will be tantamount, particularly around questions of archival silences.

I agree with Bert’s assessment, but I also want to bring my perspective to this as a public university records manager (the other half of my job is digital archivist), that I think many archivists whose work doesn’t include an institutional records mandate often miss. I get the sense from recent archivist conferences and meetings that if we just raise our consciousness enough, if we advocate just hard enough, if we can be just squeaky enough, it’s within our power as archivists to prevent many of the issues around things like digital black holes or archival silences. Being a records manager has taught me that nothing could be farther from the truth; because those with the most power within organizations are rarely the same individuals tasked with carrying out records mandates, there will always be archival silences despite archivists’ and records managers’ best efforts. I may write in “Transfer to archives” under the disposition area of a records retention schedule, but that act of instruction is not an assurance that the records are actually preserved.

Currently, I think a lot of online and offline discussion around archival silences is dominated by archivists who work or have been professionally socialized within a manuscripts/external donor/topical collecting framework. The perspectives of people who are required by their jobs to dedicate the majority of their time to preservation of institutional records of the parent organization’s official business (be it corporate, government, university, etc) are often missing. This is unfortunate, because I believe there are as many archival silences among institutionally-mandated records as there are among archives that emphasize collecting content from external parties.

In a 2004 article on archival silences, Rodney Carter’s article approaches the paradox of powerful entities’ determination of what goes in the archive, while actively resisting full documentation of their activities. However, the majority of Carter’s article (and additional recent literature on archival silences) focused on the lacunae of marginalized groups from mainstream archives. Much of the literature on archival silences explain these silences through the biases of archivists, claims of objectivity, or chasing the trends of historians. These concerns have become a rich part of the archival literature, and have led to the rise of community archives, training activists in archival methods, post-custodial models, and other revitalized forms of practice to preserve non-institutional archives.

If archivists care about accountability, I would argue that within the context and mandates of institutional archives, silences associated with the powerful have just as many ramifications. In countless circumstances, the powerful actively resist documentation or inclusion in the archive. In a 2013 post from Records Management Roundtable member Brad Houston, he builds on a conversation with Maarja Krusten reflecting on how digital technologies have enabled records creators to easily circumvent cooperation with records policies. In a highly litigious environment, or in areas where the powerful are often more concerned with their public appearance than in fully-documenting their work, there are myriad ways in which people routinely circumvent records requirements. Just as appraisal is never a neutral activity, neither is retention scheduling (which obviously constitutes its own form of appraisal). For a very current view of the political weight around records retention scheduling, I would refer readers to the inconsistency among jurisdictions on the retention around non-evidentiary body-worn camera video .

A lack of records associated with the powerful within the context of institutionally-mandated archives denies people an important avenue to examine the evidential actions of elected officials, CEOs, and other leaders, and hold them accountable. In his work on the nature of police records in post-Katrina New Orleans, and the records of prisons (which includes an analysis of retention schedules, something I wish we saw more in our literature), Jarrett Drake notes that state records can and often are manipulated or destroyed in order to protect the powerful. Because of this, human rights archival literature has long argued that state records alone cannot be the entire corpus of evidence for bringing about justice. But the question remains — what can archivists, records managers, and others who work within an institutionally-mandated records program (the ones who write retention schedules, arrange for records transfers, and educate records creators on policies and procedures) realistically do to ensure that institutional records are authentic, and that what comes to the archives aren’t just the public relations leftovers that make the institution look good?

From my perspective, silences of the powerful highlight the fact that there are two other forms of archival silences that can be explained by factors outside of archivists’ direct control:

1. Lack of, or inconsistent cooperation with records disposition on the part of records creators. This should not necessarily be construed as active malfeasance — but for many people, disposition of their records (via destruction or transfer to archives) is a perennial after-thought. In a recent report from Archives New Zealand, it noted that in virtually every office it audited, disposal and transfer of records was “inconsistent.” Although countless archivists have called for embedding ourselves at the beginning of the record life cycle, it would appear we are nowhere close to successfully doing this on a large scale. We often forget that archivists are not the sole arbiters of what resides in an institutional archive: preservation of the records of the organization is highly dependent on individual employees’ cooperation with institutional records policies. Resistance or non-cooperation leads to myriad silences; and these gaps become problematic in ensuring institutional accountability.

2. The 30-year long cycle of poverty that afflicts archives. Obviously very well-funded archives with significant staffing and resources can, and are, still rife with bias. However, many (most) archivists, whether in institutional archives or collecting archives, are constrained in their ability to process and preserve as many records as they would like to due to a persistent lack of archival labor and resources. If every archive could double (quadruple) its staff, this would help fix many silences by being proactive about identifying record gaps, doing the hard work of maintaining relationships with originating offices or donors, establishing post-custodial relationships where appropriate, etc. Not all records are lost due to active destruction, many are often lost due to benign neglect. A 2014 report showed that 33,000 of boxes intended to be transferred to British Columbia Archives were warehoused instead due to insufficient resources . If archivists with institutional record mandates are overworked and under-resourced, is anyone surprised that all they have time for is dealing with the records that do manage to get transferred? (And even then, many institutional archives have a hard time keeping up with what does manage to come through the door, for example according to a recent OIG report, 28% of NARA’s textual holdings have not yet been processed).

And this is where I want to push back against Bertram’s post a little bit and bring it back to the digital dark age — in an environment with institutional records mandates where archivists have little power to enforce compliance with records policies and even less agency over the budgets they receive, the risk of a digital black hole is very, very real. According to last year’s Council of State Archivists report, the number of state archives FTE employees dedicated to electronic records actually decreased from 2006 to 2014, and there are now fewer state archives staff relative to overall state employees. State archives have reported that there is a consistent gap between the authority to carry out state records policies, and the resources needed to actually perform or deliver duties and services. Archivists with institutional records mandates rarely have the authority or resources to go out and get all the electronic records on their own that are required to be transferred to the archives. For us, the digital dark age remains a major risk without organizational buy-in and adequate funding, and the full support of our professional organizations for the challenges we face.

Eira Tansey works as the Digital Archivist/Records Manager at the University of Cincinnati. She is a Steering Committee Member of SAA’s Records Management Roundtable.

May 23, 2016November 29, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: appraisal, archival labor, archival silences, archives profession, biases, Digital Dark Age, digital preservation, donors, Eira Tansey, erasure, institutional records, professionalism, record destruction, selection 9 Comments

There Will Be No Digital Dark Age

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Below is a post from Bertram Lyons addressing the alleged “Digital Dark Age.” If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com.

[Update: Eira Tansey, from SAA’s Records Management Roundtable has written a response to this piece.]

On January 4, 2016, NPR published a story, “Will Future Historians Consider These Days The Digital Dark Ages?”, with the tagline: “We are awash in a sea of information, but how do historians sift through the mountain of data? In the future, computer programs will be unreadable, and therefore worthless, to historians.”^[1]

As is often the case with news media, there is a noticeable absence in the way the story is framed. Read the tagline again. What is missing? It seems that the journalist ignores the fact that historians^[2] have intermediaries called archivists who not only select and aggregate data for the future but who have also been heavily engaged in the question of digital preservation and digital acquisition since at least the 1980s.^[3] We, as archivists, are not absent, and have not been absent from the action.^[4] We are, however, hidden in the public narrative. This not being the first time that I felt frustrated to see archivists (and our sibling professions) left out of the conversation, I left a note on the NPR comment page for the article:

“Hi Eric. This is a nice story. Something we need to remember, and that did not come across in your story, is that this is an issue that archives, libraries, museums, funding agencies (IMLS, NEH, NSF), and many, many others have dedicated decades of time and millions of dollars into researching, responding to, and developing methods to prevent such a digital dark age. Nothing in your report is news to any practicing records managers, archivists, cultural heritage collection managers, librarians, or any others whose responsibility it is to take care of historical and informational documentation. It is great that NPR is promoting this issue, but please do not promote the issue as if only a few prophet-like or savior-like individuals are involved. From NASA to the Smithsonian, from Harvard to Indiana University, from the Internet Archive to the British Library, there is an army of practitioners working on this problem—and it will take an army, not just a few, to ensure we carry our digital information with us into the future. But we will succeed, just as we succeeded in previous generations by amassing an army of librarians to carry our books with us, and an army of museologists to carry our artifacts.”

I really am not sure how many people this comment reached. Maybe no more than 30 if I had to make a guess. But that is not the real point of this post. The point is not about my small response to this one report on NPR. One of the points I hope to make has already been stated: We are not and have not been absent from the digital preservation questions. We are, however, hidden in the public narrative. From emerging efforts to improve social media data collection activities such as Documenting the Now^[5] to decade-old web archiving programs such as the Internet Archive; from the ePADD email analysis project at Stanford University^[6] to the enduring work of the Digital Preservation Management Workshops and Tutorials,^[7] as well as the Digital POWRR project;^[8] from LOCKSS and CLOCKSS networks to the continued outreach of the NDSA; from the forensic methodologies applied in the archives domain via the BitCurator project^[9] to the millions of hours audiovisual archivists the world over have already put into the process of avoiding the never-mentioned magnetic dark age;^[10] the list of archive-based digital preservation and documentation initiatives goes on. Seriously, the list of projects and research alone could fill an archive, not to mention the enormous amount of actual digital content collected, selected, and processed each day by archivists, librarians, museum professionals, records managers, and many others in the collecting domains around the world. We are there, we are doing the work, we will continue to do the work, and we, most of all, must continue to communicate about our digital preservation work outside of the walls of the archive profession.^[11]

However, even a few weeks into the future, I would argue with myself about the comment I made on the NPR site. I did not go far enough to address the important topics of selection and appraisal, nor the complexity of who collects and selects the documentation that will persist into the future. Which leads to the other point I hope to make in the context of a digital dark age: the concepts of selection and agency to collect are more salient today than the fear of lost bits. We critique the contents of archives today — the absences, the presences — because, as archivists, we know that appraisal and selection matter. Even as, today, we ask important questions about how these activities should change — focusing on what is selected for the archive and by whom, and to be stored where and for how long — we ask these questions to improve the effect archives and archivists can have on society, to reveal assumptions and biases in the practice of archives, and, in turn, to affect change within the archives profession itself.

The digital dark age will not happen in the way that the media predict it. We should not be blinded by a fear of the inability to ensure persistence of digital information. As I mentioned above, it is obvious that as a profession (and as part of larger communities) we are engaged in the technical solutions to that issue.^[12] If we have any digital dark age, it will manifest, as has been the case in the past with other forms of information, as a silence within the archive, as a series of gaping holes where groups of individuals and communities are absent because there was no path into the archive for them,^[13] where important social events go undocumented because we were not prepared to act quickly enough, and where new modalities for communication are not planned for. The digital dark age will only happen if we, as communities of archives and archivists, do not reimagine appraisal and selection in light of the historical gaps revealed in collections today.

It is the digital-ness of today’s world that may actually allow archives to reach out to and to document (or to support self-documentation of) the enormity and complexity of society in a way that has never been feasible before.^[14]

Bertram Lyons is a Certified Archivist and senior consultant with AVPreserve, where he specializes in digital asset management, digital preservation strategy, digital repository development, and in the acquisition, management, and preservation of documentary, research, and cultural heritage collections.

 For fourteen years Bert has worked as an archivist for extensive archives, first at the Alan Lomax Archive and most recently at the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress, where he developed tools, policies, and partnerships around the development and management of analog and digital archival collections. His recent activities include the implementation of digital risk assessment standards in the assessment of digital preservation environments; development of digital collections management workflows, tools, and policies (including a new tool, Exactly); the design and implementation of a nation-wide, EAD-compliant, multi-user online cataloging platform for folklore collections, a project sponsored by the American Folklore Society and hosted at Indiana University; the design, development, and implementation of the U.S. International Standard Music Number (ISMN) web application for the Music Division at the Library of Congress, the U.S. ISMN agency; as well as the development of a collaborative workflow system for the congressionally mandated U.S. Civil Rights History Project, a born-digital oral-history partnership between the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

 Bert is active nationally and internationally with professional archival organizations such as the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (Member of the Executive Board and Editor of IASA publications) and the Society of American Archivists (Chair of the Membership Committee). He has also received certification from the Academy of Certified Archivists and is a graduate of the Archives Leadership Institute. He holds a MA in museum studies with a focus in American studies and archival theory from the University of Kansas.

Bert is also an associate lecturer in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches Archive Appraisal & Theory, Digital Curation, and Web & Social Media Archiving. He will be serving as a new SAA DAS faculty member in 2016, teaching an introductory course on command line scripting for archive workflows.

^[1] Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2016/01/04/461878724/will-future-historians-consider-these-times-the-digital-dark-ages, 2016-04-27.

^[2] Actually, many who write “history” today are heavily engaged in digital archaeology or digital humanities and, themselves, have the skills and capacity to reconstitute abandoned and/or obsolete data formats.

^[3] An easy example is this list of the writings of David Bearman, stretching back into the 1970s, actually: http://www.archimuse.com/consulting/bearman_pub.html, or Jennifer Trant, beginning in the 1980s, http://www.archimuse.com/consulting/trant_pub.html. Really the list could go on and on.

^[4] I have to thank Ed Summers (http://inkdroid.org/) for the reminder to revisit the excellent work of David Rosenthal on the question of the digital dark age: http://blog.dshr.org/2011/02/are-we-facing-digital-dark-age.html.

^[5] Read more: http://mith.umd.edu/introducing-documenting-the-now/.

^[6] Read more: https://library.stanford.edu/projects/epadd.

^[7] Read more: http://www.dpworkshop.org/.

^[8] Read more: http://digitalpowrr.niu.edu/.

^[9] Read more: http://www.bitcurator.net/.

^[10] You know why? Because archivists.

^[11] And, of course, there are many examples of this activity ongoing today, including efforts surrounding personal digital archiving, digital humanities and other academic collaborations, and research data management programs.

^[12] We do need to continue to broadcast these efforts beyond the profession, however.

^[13] Or there was no repositioning of an archive that exists within their bounds, within their control.

^[14] I mentioned Documenting the Now previously in this post, but this is an excellent example of a combined  technological and ideological approach to address the absence of voices and experiences that have long been silent in the archive by refocusing collecting agency, reinforcing ethics and privacy, and redefining the archival record.

May 11, 2016November 29, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: acquisition, appraisal, archives profession, biases, Black history, born-digital records, Digital Dark Age, digital preservation, Documenting the Now, Eira Tansey, IMLS, Internet Archive, library school, outreach, personal archives, professionalism, selection, U.S. history, undocumented immigrants, web archiving 17 Comments