The Quantum Archivist

In a recent interview for the Digital Pioneers project, Howard Besser called YouTube the “ephemeral material of today” and a “microphone on the water cooler discussions people have at work.”   You can hear these comments for yourself about 4 minutes into the conversation on critical issues facing cultural heritage digitization.

Recent news about the Library of Congress collecting Twitter tweets would seem to confirm that social network material is the new “correspondence” series of personal papers collections if the terms correspondence and personal papers could be said to still have meaning in today’s archival environment. They are becoming the record of personal and casual social and intellectual interaction of the current age.

Is YouTube the kind of “ordinary everyday material produced by ordinary everyday people” that Howard Besser says it is? I guess that depends on your definition of “ordinary.” Certainly YouTube and Twitter are a view into a certain sector of the population, one that is reasonably literate and has a certain level of technological ability. And the technological barrier is certainly a lot lower than it was even a couple of years ago so this form of communication is available to a much larger pool of potential users. By collecting this content centrally, we can have access to a vast amount of material from a huge variety of people, far more than ever would have donated their personal papers to an archive. So in this aspect, I agree with Howard completely.

I’d argue though that documenting the contents of social networking tools only gets us back to where we were in the age of paper, and not much beyond that. Although my evidence is purely anecdotal, I’d bet that the people who create YouTube videos and are on Twitter, are by and large, educated people who are at home with the visual and literary communications methods of today. And although it is now so much easier for anyone from that group to get his or her ideas spread across the globe, I believe that the people who were voiceless in the age of paper have not made similar progress.

It would be interesting to think if Ben Franklin, the Sons of Liberty, and the authors of the Federalist Papers would have been on YouTube and blogs had they existed in those times.  If it had been possible, would John and Abigail Adams have posted messages to each other’s Facebook pages rather than fool with those messy quill pens? And if they had, and we didn’t preserve this highly ephemeral material, what would we know of the early struggles of the American nation? What future counterparts to Abigail and John Adams are posting in blogs, or tweeting, or making YouTube videos of things that inspire or outrage them?

While we HAVE become much better about documenting the formal means of communications of our society in the digital age, I think that we could be at even greater risk of losing not only the ephemera of today’s society, but the personal papers of our entire culture because we blithely rely on organizations beyond our control, who have no interest in our content as historical artifacts, to maintain and preserve our own personal history for us.  (A note of disclosure here: My wife and I run a blog on a hosted web site where we post news and stories about our family for friends and relatives and this blog is hosted by a for-profit service provider.) Yet what choice do we have? As archivists and digital librarians, we have to find ways to solve this dilemma.

Digital Pioneers web site

A few months ago I posted a bit about Digital Pioneers, a project I was involved with that has as it’s aim a project to document a period of time (c.1994 – 2005) and a type of project (i.e. one that transformed analog cultural materials into digital form) that explored the possibilities of digitization of material that was commonly held by libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in the words of the people who were present at the creation. The original project was organized around a class project at the University of Denver’s Library and Information Science Program. After the class ended, responsibility for Digital Pioneers was transferred to the Digital Initiatives office here at the Penrose Library, where we will continue to develop the project and interview more subjects as time and resources permit.

Our goal is to put a human face on the development of cultural heritage digitization. The story of the content and the technology development is told in the peer-reviewed publications and white papers, but we want to find out what people were actually thinking and attempting to do when they embarked on building the digital future; the challenges they faced, and the insights they developed as agents of change.

For now, there is a somewhat eclectic (but based on specific criteria) gathering of reminiscences, observations, and visions from a small group of people we were able to contact and interview in the time that we had. More interviews are in the pipeline, and many more people have already been identified as potential interview subjects. If you have a suggestion for someone who should be interviewed, please fill out the Suggestion Form on the Digital Pioneers web site. And for now, enjoy hearing the stories from a time and place that is fast becoming only a memory.

Ten years into the twenty-first century we are beginning to see a movement among archivists to move forward into the twentieth century. All this really means is that Archivists are beginning to understand the balance between being and becoming. The idea that constant change, balanced and tempered by a consistent theoretical foundation, might just be the roadmap for the profession is slowly permeating the ethos of more “modern” or forward thinking archivists.

Howard Besser says that most new technology is used at first to mimic the old ways in a new form. “The conceptual steps [of technology development] typically include first trying to replicate core activities that functioned in the analog environment.”  So it stands to reason then that before we could invent new forms of access we had to re-invent the paper finding aid in the form of EAD.

However, it seemed that in doing so we raised the finding aid, rather than access to the material itself, to the level of an objective and actually prevented archivists from providing good service in the Internet environment. Before the age of computers and digitization,  there really was no point in providing highly granular content information to users. You still had to come to the repository and interact with the content in ways that did not disrupt the physical order of the boxes and folders. This filing system approach, while efficient and effective in its time and place, was a barrier to use. Everyone understood this, but no one had any real idea of how to do it better or differently. Thus, archivists became the interpreters of collections, a kind of human finding aid.

As with any bureaucratic system (and I mean this in the most positive possible sense), once it was devised, a class of apparatchiks grew up to tend the system and became vested in its perpetuation. The essential conservative nature of archives also contributed to the idea that the finding aid was sacred and that the Archivist as gatekeeper was the best possible way to provide service. I’ll wager that this access method was never satisfactory to the general user, but then, the only “serious” researchers were supposed to use archives anyway.

I don’t want to say that the parents of EAD didn’t do creative work. But they were working within a context of thinking from which they were unable to break free. It would have been surprising if they had, and if they did, perhaps no one would have listened to them anyway.

My own introduction to formal archival education came just before the introduction of EAD, and since I came from a research and teaching background, my idea of what an archives could or should be was based on user-centered ideas (although I didn’t know that term at the time).  I wanted to get to the “stuff” and draw my own conclusions, after all, that’s what I was there for. Most of my work when I was a classroom teacher centered on teaching with primary sources. It was always surprising what a group of students would see in a set of documents that I had never seen.

When I crossed over from researcher/teacher to service provider, I always believed that keeping the researcher as close to the content as possible was the most important thing an archivist could do. Give them the stuff and get out of the way!

Although it is obviously not quite as simple as that, we do have the capability to do this now. The Internet and digitization makes this all possible. But just how will we do it? By constantly trying new ways to present our archival material.

A couple of years ago, I gave a presentation at the SAA meeting in Chicago that I called “Where Have All the Binders Gone?” That introduced an idea that we should try to manage and provide access as close to the content as possible. This later evolved into the theory of quantum archives and is the inspiration for this blog.