Information as evidence Week 4 Lecture notes INF 380E: Perspectives on Information Karen Wickett School of Information University of Texas at Austin Spring 2016

Metadata in Everyday Online Life proposals are due on Wednesday For your proposal, outline what website you are planning to analyze. Upload a document with 1-2 paragraphs of text for your proposal submission. In your proposal be sure to: – Identify the website you will analyze in your paper (include links) – Briefly describe the users you will be focusing on in your analysis – Briefly describe the kinds of objects your website describes Paper description

Paper structure Three primary elements: 1.Description (3-4 pages) 2.Analysis (2-3 pages) 3.Synthesis (1-2 pages)

Description Be sure to describe what objects are being described how those descriptions are structured who these descriptions are intended to serve.

Describing the structure What attributes are used? – Do they appear to be optional or required? Does the information appear as explicit attribute value pairs? Does the information appear together with the object (or an object surrogate?) – will depend on the kind of object Or as tags? Do any attributes appear to have values from controlled vocabularies? Do the values have any identifiable structure? Do any of the values act as links? – Where do the links take you? – outside the site or to another thing on the site?

Analysis Two required components: 1.Analyze the metadata with respect to the types and characteristic of metadata described in Gilliland's Setting the Stage. 2.Consider how the metadata attributes contribute to the site as an information organization system. – i.e. how do they help your identified user group get information about things?

Categories and Characteristics Functional categories of metadata (Table 2) – Administrative, Technical, Descriptive, Preservation, Use Attributes and Characteristics (Table 3) – Source, Method, Semantics, etc. 7

Primary Functions For this piece of your analysis, you need to be able to point to the primary roles of the site and the users. To evaluate, you can use: – Gilliland's Primary Functions of Metadata – FRBR's User Needs see Chapter 2: Objectives, Scope and Method 8

Synthesis Relate the observations from your analysis to themes that we’ve discussed in class. Some suggested themes: Principles of description – bibliographic (Svenonius) or archival (Gilliland-Swetland) Use of standards – in attributes and in values User-generated content and metadata Potentials and challenges for automation in description Power, privilege and accessibility in description Information life cycle Definitions of collections

Activity Get back into your groups from last week, or join a group. Say hello to your group members 10

Activity: At Last versions

At Last Activity (part 2) Analyze the objects according to the FRBR Group One Model. Some FRBR definitions: – A work is “a distinct intellectual or artistic creation.” – An expression is analagous to a text: “the intellectual or artistic realization of a work” in a form, be it textual, sound, image, musical notation, whatever. The expression encompasses the intellectual but not the physical form. – A manifestation in FRBR is the realization of an expression in a physical medium. All copies that are produced as part of the same set are the same manifestation. additional FRBR relationships: – has a successor – has a supplement – has a complement – has a summary – has adaptation – has a transformation – has an imitation Each of the relationships can stand between two works, between two expressions, or between an expression and a work.

The archival perspective Records are fragmentary evidence of what actually happens The goal of an archivist is to describe and arrange fragmentary evidence in a way that allows the reconstruction of what happened Relies on hierarchy as an economic alternative to the complex graph of meaning that would ideally capture a record in all of its relevant contexts. 13

Finding aid [SAA]SAA a single document that places the materials in context by consolidating information about the collection, such as: – acquisition and processing; – provenance, including administrative history or biographical note; – scope of the collection, including size, subjects, media; – organization and arrangement; – and an inventory of the series and the folders. 14

Archival Description A finding aid documents: – all the records of the same provenance, – their arrangement, and the chain of custody that brought them into archival control. It permits economies in description: – Collective description is less expensive than item-level description – enables archivists to decide how far down in the hierarchy detailed description is needed on the basis of the values exhibited by the materials and the anticipated level and nature of use. For many kinds of historical and bureaucratic uses, it mirrors the arrangement of the records and provides a logical way to search for materials. This approach can be applied regardless of the nature of a collection and does not require specialized description for special forms of materials. 15

Encoded Archival Description EAD is a data structure standard for preparing encoded digital finding aids – Originally written in SGML, now an XML schema – XML is a hierarchical data structure, and EAD uses XML hierarchies to represent archival hierarchies. Guide to the Austin City Limits Collection 16

Primary and secondary use Gilliland-Swetland: – “For archivists administering record programs within their own institutions, the primary uses of records were legal proof and administrative research, often conducted by the records creators. – For manuscript administration, the focus was on secondary use by historical scholars.” 17

Principles supporting the archival perspective (Gilliland-Swetland) the sanctity of evidence; respect des fonds, provenance, and original order; the life cycle of records; the organic nature of records; and hierarchy in records and their descriptions. 18

Evidence in the archival sense defined by Gilliland-Swetland as: the passive ability – of documents, objects, and their associated contexts to provide insight into – the processes, activities, and events that led to their creation – for legal, historical, archaeological, and other purposes. 19

Records as evidence MacNeil – “The Latin word evidence means ‘that which is manifest or in plain sight’. – evidence is that which brings the invisible (that is, a past event) back into plain sight. – The observational principles on which we ground our belief in records as trustworthy evidence thus reflect a conception of records as witnesses to events, and a corresponding view of the world as one that is capable of being so witnessed.” 20

respect des fonds a principle that states that records should be grouped according to the nature of the institution that accumulated them Facilitates physical and intellectual access to records generated and received by the same institution or person – by gathering and describing them as an intellectual whole – regardless of their form, medium, or volume. 21

Principle of provenance Two components: 1.Records of the same provenance should not be mixed with those of a different provenance. 2.The archivist should maintain the original order in which the records were created and kept. 22

Life Cycle of Records 23

Hierarchy in Records and Descriptions “Records have an innate hierarchy imposed by the creating agency's filing practices and position in a bureaucratic hierarchy and by the processes through which the records were created. A fond may contain sous-fonds or a record group may contain subgroups, which may in turn contain many series of records, each relating to a different activity. Individual record series may be divided into subseries and even subsubseries, which may be further divided into filing units that contain individual documents.” – Gilliland-Swetland 24

Records as evidence of what exactly? MacNeil – the view of records as reliable and authentic evidence of past events depends on – a belief that it is possible to separate the observer from the event being observed This belief has come under scrutiny over the past century. The benchmarks of reliability and authenticity are themselves “human constructs that have been shaped within a particular historical and cultural context”. 25

MacNeil procedural controls imposed over record-making and record-keeping – classification, registration, access privileges, audit trails, continuous monitoring, perpetual assessment traditionally viewed as means of increasing the probability of a record’s trustworthiness but they are also “techniques that reinforce and extend bureaucratic structures of power through the relentless and pervasive use of surveillance” 26

Bearman points to a failure in archival information systems to distinguish between provenance information about organizations and descriptive data about the records themselves 27

Access points Bearman: – a characteristic which can be used in conjunction with other characteristics to identify a set of objects for examination an essential guiding question in the design and implementation of an information organization system: – which characteristics will prove most discriminating and most useful to searchers 28

Organizational view of retrieval P Method – a user has a subject-based query – the archivist translates the query into the terms of organizational activity – then searches according to the file classification of the originating organizational entity (office, division, etc.) this is an inferential process – resting on a detailed understanding of the structures and processes of the organizations in question – and on an assumption of the “classical view” of organizations 29

Emphasize form and function functions are independent from organizational structure more closely related to the significance of documentation forms of materials can be recognized from the commonalities of structure in materials 30

Authority records “The purpose of an authority record is to maintain a common ‘language’ between the users of an information system” “Authority records can provide consistency in the use of name, subject, geographical, or other access points.” Authorities (information about entities mentioned in descriptions) should be separated logically from description of records. 31

SNAC rch rch “SNAC is demonstrating the feasibility of separating the description of persons, families, and organizations—including their socio-historical contexts—from the description of the historical resources that are the primary evidence of their lives and work.” 32