Contexts built and found: a pilot study on the process of archival meaning-making

Duff, Wendy; Monks-Leeson, Emily; Galey, Alan

doi:10.1007/s10502-011-9145-2

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Understanding and categorising users can help to develop, adapt and evaluate information systems from the perspective of the user and their environment. For example, users with a lack of archival expertise may find formulating search request, interpreting and contextualising search results difficult [14]. Knowing this would allow specific search aids to be designed and implemented to support these users.…”

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confidence: 99%

Characterising online museum users: a study of the National Museums Liverpool museum website

et al. 2018

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Museums are increasing access to their collections and providing richer user experiences via web-based interfaces. However, they are seeing high numbers of users looking at only one or two pages within 10 s and then leaving. To reduce this rate, a better understanding of the type of user who visits a museum website is required. Existing models for museum website users tend to focus on groups that are readily accessible for study or provide little detail in their definitions of the groups. This paper presents the results of a large-scale user survey for the National Museums Liverpool museum website in which data on a wide range of user characteristics were collected regarding their current visit to provide a better understanding of their motivations, tasks, engagement and domain knowledge. Results show that the frequently understudied general public and non-professional users make up the majority (approximately 77%) of the respondents. Keywords Digital cultural heritage • Museum website • User research • User groups • Survey 1 Introduction Museums have expanded their web-based offerings, providing not only access to general information about the museums, but also direct access to their holdings, digital collections and online exhibits. Various studies have explored the relationship between museums, their websites and visitors, especially how museum websites are used to connect visitors' pre-and post-visit activities to the physical museum [31]. The provision of web-based resources has opened up museums to wider and more diverse user groups and led to a significant rise in the number of visitors to museum websites B David Walsh

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Characterising online museum users: a study of the National Museums Liverpool museum website

et al. 2018

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“…The call of these authors for the information professions to cross the wild frontier and look beyond the custodial fold has been increasingly answered in the practice of the information professions. User studies are now ubiquitous, as witnessed by the expansion of the burgeoning field of ''information seeking, behaviour and use'' to cover all aspects of information practice (Case 2012), including archives (Duff and Johnson 2002;Duff et al 2004), digital museums (Skov 2009), professional education in a book studies programme (Duff et al 2012), and archaeological field work (Huvila 2008a). Such research initiatives have contributed to the emergence of new important understandings of the situatedness, historicity, and social contingency of dealing with recorded information.…”

Section: A Pragmatic Approach To Digital Curationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital curation beyond the “wild frontier”: a pragmatic approach

Dallas

2015

Arch Sci

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This paper advocates the necessity of developing a pragmatic alternative to the dominant custodial theorization of digital curation as an ''umbrella concept for digital preservation, data curation, electronic records, and digital asset management''. Starting from a historical account and an examination of prevalent definitions, it points to the current dependence of digital curation on a prescriptive approach rooted in its cognate field of digital preservation, aiming to serve the needs of professional stewardship. It demonstrates the disconnect of this theorization with the rich historical traditions of museum curatorship where the notion of curation originated, its inability to act as a framework for understanding the diversity and pervasiveness of contemporary digital curation practices ''in the wild'' (such as content curation, personal archiving, and pro-am digitization), and its dependence on a ''wild frontier'' ideology dissonant with contemporary critical cultural heritage scholarship. The alternative, pragmatic approach views digital curation as a ''contact zone'' practice, routinely performed by a broad range of actors including researchers, artists, users, and communities, on dynamically evolving objects, domain knowledge representations, and interactions, beyond the curation life cycle prescribed for custodial environments. On this basis, this study calls for a formal reconceptualization of digital curation, adequate knowledge representation of its objects, evidence-based research on curation practices, and establishment of curation-enabled digital infrastructures suitable for curation in the continuum. Reaching & Costis Dallas beyond a custodial view, this approach aims to establish digital curation as a field of intellectual inquiry relevant to emerging pervasive curation practices in the digital environment.

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“…Context is particularly important to historians (and other humanities scholars) because their mode of research is centered not just on seeking and finding information, but also on the act of contextualizing and therefore interpreting that information (Duff & Johnson, ). This interpretation relies not only on building knowledge of the people, organizations, and events that brought the information into existence, but what can be gleaned in the way in which the documents were organized and colocated by the creator (Duff & Johnson, ; Duff, Monks‐Leeson, & Galey, ). Here, the idea of evidence is bound up with notions of proof, trustworthiness, justification, and the establishment of facts.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The value and complexity of collection arrangement for evidentiary work

Trace

Francisco-Revilla

2015

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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Archives are invaluable resources for those interested in understanding past activities and events. What makes archival collections valuable as evidence is that they are organized in a way that connects the materials to their creator(s), their associated activities, and recordkeeping systems. In order to create this organization archivists engage in a complex process that involves arranging materials physically and intellectually. This arrangement focuses on documenting the original order of the materials and making them evident to secondary users. The time-consuming nature of this process has resulted in a massive backlog of unprocessed (and thus unavailable) collections, which represents an impediment to the investigative activities of scholars and researchers. To help alleviate such a situation, this article presents a novel approach to archival arrangement, using tabletop computers and digitized images. The article explains the project design and implementation and discusses the evaluation results. This work provides several major contributions to the field, including: a new system that allows archival collections to be arranged digitally, new methods and metrics for evaluating archival arrangements, a detailed analysis of the steps involved in archival arrangement and how they correlate with the final outcomes of the process, and a method for analyzing arrangements based on the topologies created by processing archivists.

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Contexts built and found: a pilot study on the process of archival meaning-making

Cited by 18 publications

References 33 publications

Characterising online museum users: a study of the National Museums Liverpool museum website

Characterising online museum users: a study of the National Museums Liverpool museum website

Digital curation beyond the “wild frontier”: a pragmatic approach

The value and complexity of collection arrangement for evidentiary work

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