Archives on the Internet: Representing Contexts and Provenance from Repository to Website

Monks-Leeson, Emily

doi:10.17723/aarc.74.1.h386n333653kr83u

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…AtoM supports subject, name, place, and genre access points, which have the potential to support user browsing, collate material in new ways for researchers, and build new intellectual arrangements beyond provenance, thus shifting the ways in which traditional archival description privileges knowledge systems that centre singular notions of creatorship (Drake 2016b;Monks-Leeson 2011;Yeo 2015;Zhang 2012). 11 This shift benefits researchers, who encounter descriptions not as static pages but as sets of links and nodes that lead from one set of records to another.…”

Section: First Steps: Deep Description In Discover Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge Lost, Knowledge Gained

Ansovini¹,

Babcock

Franco

et al. 2022

KULA

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Migrating archival description from paper-based finding aids to structured online data reconfigures the dynamics of archival representation and interactions. This paper considers the knowledge implications of transferring traditional finding aids to Discover Archives, a university-wide implementation of Access to Memory (AtoM) at the University of Toronto. The migration and translation of varied descriptive practices to conform to a single system that is accessible to anyone, anywhere, effectively shifts both where and how users interface with archives and their material. This paper reflects on how different sets of knowledge are reorganized in these shifts. Discover Archives empowers researchers to do independent searches using the full breadth of their domain expertise, seemingly unbound from archival gatekeeping. At the same time, these searches are performed in the absence of archivists' unstructured mediation, where searches benefit from human interaction and the kinds of knowledges that reference staff draw on to handle complex reference questions, especially those from novice archival users. We explore the extent to which that lost knowledge can be drawn back into archival interactions via rich metadata that documents contexts and relationships embedded within Discover Archives and beyond. Internal user experience design (UXD) research on Discover Archives highlights a gap between current online description and habitual user expectations in web search and discovery. To help bridge this gap, we contributed to broader discovery nodes such as linked open "context hubs" like Wikipedia and Wikidata, which can supplement hierarchical description with linked metadata and visualization capabilities. These can reintroduce rhizomatic and serendipitous connections, enabled by archivist, researcher, and larger sets of community knowledges, to the benefit of both the user and the archivist.

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Section: First Steps: Deep Description In Discover Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge Lost, Knowledge Gained

Ansovini¹,

Babcock

Franco

et al. 2022

KULA

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“…In short, “Provenance is paramount” (Fraser 2018). Provenance is a major theme in archival management and archaeology and in collecting wine, art, books, and antiquities, where ownership history significantly influences market value (Gill and Chippindale 2007; Monks-Leeson 2011; Sweeney 2008). Opaque pathways between production and possession can render even authentic items worthless or fundamentally tainted.…”

Section: Provenance: An Interdisciplinary Foundationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Provenance Problem: Research Methods and Ethics in the Age of WikiLeaks

Darnton

2021

Am Polit Sci Rev

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How should political scientists navigate the ethical and methodological quandaries associated with analyzing leaked classified documents and other nonconsensually acquired sources? Massive unauthorized disclosures may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, but they are fraught with dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. This paper critiques underspecified research designs and opaque references in the proliferation of scholarship with leaked materials, as well as incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading journals. It identifies provenance as the primary concept for improved standards and reviews other disciplines’ approaches to this problem. It elaborates eight normative and evidentiary criteria for scholars by which to assess source legitimacy and four recommendations for balancing their trade-offs. Fundamentally, it contends that scholars need deeper reflection on source provenance and its consequences, more humility about whether to access new materials and what inferences to draw, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

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“…A potential solution is the advent of a collaborative database and community archive. Community-based online archives, as described by Emily Monks-Leeson in American Archivist, are "websites created by individuals, organizations, or institutions who presumably have little or no grounding in archival theory yet desire to make historical material accessible in digital form" (Monks-Leeson 2011). With this in mind, the prototype demonstrates an example of a transparent repository where books-to-prison organizations and individuals could regularly document book challenges and share them with the public.…”

Section: Prototyping a Potential Solutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Banned Books behind Bars: Prototyping a Data Repository to Combat Arbitrary Censorship Practices in U.S. Prisons

Cauley

2020

Humanities

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“Banned Books Behind Bars” is a social justice project that aims to shed light on the complex problem of information access in prison and to explore potential prototypes for possible solutions to some of these obstacles, in particular access to books and printed information. The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population but a staggering twenty-five percent of the world’s total prisoners. For many incarcerated individuals, access to information is a struggle: censorship, book banning, and lack of adequate library facilities or collections are common. Over the course of conducting preliminary research, this project evolved through the research process of ideation. Through the participatory action research method, qualitative interviews with volunteers from banned books organizations helped to identify potential digital tools meant to aid in the fight against the First Amendment violations that incarcerated individuals face daily. Furthermore, the interviews clarified that the first step toward creating an impactful digital project involves converting various forms of unstructured data, including newspaper articles, prison censorship forms, and state published banned book lists, into structured data. Through this discovery, “Banned Books Behind Bars” became an endeavor to standardize practices of data aggregation amongst banned books organizations throughout the country. Gathering concrete data about the practice of banning books within prisons requires an elevated level of transparency. Incarcerated individuals, their families, and prison reform activists need a platform for reporting data on censorship practices, and, ultimately, for bringing awareness to the arbitrary application of censorship guidelines within the complex world of incarceration. The final prototype is a digital repository, created with Airtable software, which offers authoritative dataset consolidation for activists and organizations working to deliver books to prisoners.

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Archives on the Internet: Representing Contexts and Provenance from Repository to Website

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Knowledge Lost, Knowledge Gained

Knowledge Lost, Knowledge Gained

The Provenance Problem: Research Methods and Ethics in the Age of WikiLeaks

Banned Books behind Bars: Prototyping a Data Repository to Combat Arbitrary Censorship Practices in U.S. Prisons

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