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

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.

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.

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.

Encoded Archival Description EAD is 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

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.”

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.

Evidence in the archival sense defined by Gilliland-Swetland as: the passive ability of: – documents and – 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.

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.”

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.

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.

Life Cycle of Records

Find a neighbor or two and discuss the following: – Does the life-cycle model describe the whole life cycle of today's digital records explicitly? – Does it accommodate all forms we might encounter? – How might we improve it?

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

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”.

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”

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

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

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

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

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.

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.”

discuss MacNeil proposes a conception of truth as “an agreed-upon stopping point in a kind of inquiry” – How might this shape an approach to archival description? – What things might we document differently?

Activity 1.Introduce yourselves 2.Select a finding aid from TARO 3.Discuss the finding aid in group, using the prompts on the hand-out. 1.Share what you found with the class

Deconstructing archives Cvetkovich – “Ephemeral evidence, spaces that are maintained by volunteer labors of love rather than state funding, challenges to cataloging, archives that represent lost histories – – gay and lesbian archives are often “magical” collections of documents that represent far more than the literal value of the objects themselves.”

Archivist as creator / creator as archivist Cvetkovich looks at documentary film-making as an archival enterprise – the filmmaker brings together historical documents to reconstruct past events – includes artifacts from personal lives and popular culture to communicate emotional context

Tracing paths – varieties of provenance How might thinking about the path through which the music tracks arrived at Youtube help to think about possibilities for altering FRBR for the needs of digital entities?