interpretation – Archives Hub Blog

I have just been re-reading a recent report: The Metadata is the Interface: Better Description for Better Discovery of Archives and Special Collections, Synthesized from User Studies, Jennifer Schaffner, OCLC Research (2009).

Jennifer’s report is well worth reading. It manages that most admirable of goals: a succinct report full of useful and relevant information that summarises others’ findings. Therefore, it is quite difficult to summarise the content. However, I will draw out some of the observations and conclusions that I think are particularly worth highlighting.

People want to discover information by themselves and at the network level, not the institutional level. Less mediation is a good thing.
Archivists often focus on what collections consist of, which is at odds with researchers, who want to learn what collections are about.
Subject access is rated highly by many users, though they may use keyword searching rather than structured terminology
It is difficult to compare studies because of an inconsistent use of terminology
Researchers prefer quality content, but above that they want more descriptions, even if they are minimal, in order to open up more archival content
Some users prefer summary records, some prefer detail – from our user studies we cannot really draw conclusions as to which is preferred
Successful discovery currently requires too much understanding from the researcher of what they are looking for before they even begin
Archivists should give more thought to creating descriptions that are network friendly. Most people start their searches with Google.
Archivists should give more thought to effective relevance ranking of search results

I thought it was also worth drawing out a few of the points made by Cory Nimer and J. Gordon Daines III in their report, What Do You Mean IT Doesn’t Make Sense? Redesigning Finding Aids from the User’s Perspective (Journal of Archival Organization, vol 6/4, Haworth Press 2008). Some of these points are made by others and the article references them in a literature review (apologies for not naming all those referenced). Nimer and Daines also explain their own project for The L. Tom Perry Special Collections delivery of online finding aids (not yet complete).

Archivists should re-examine the principles that underpin archival arrangement and description and have more focus on user requirements so that online finding aids are more intuitive and easy to use
Enabling user annotation would augment finding aids and may make them more intellectually accessible to a wider audience
There is a significant divergence and a lack of consensus in archival display. The users that Nimer and Daines talked to showed a level of dissatisfaction with the entire approach to EAD display; they wanted more direct access to item-level descriptions
Users want direct access to items but are unable to understand the descriptions without adequate context, so closer integration of context is important
Terminology can cause some confusion but generally users are quick to understand words when they are used in context

We are looking to learn from these sorts of reports, case studies and user studies in order to improve the Archives Hub website. We already provide direct access to item-level descriptions, but our new interface will give a better indication of hierarchy and enable users to navigate from the item level up through the context of the collection. We plan to undertake more user requirements analysis over the coming year, to help us to make the Archives Hub a more intuitive and rewarding experience for a broader base of users.

“History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.” (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)

When I attended a workshop on the Ontology of the Archive back in March 2008, Louise Craven from The National Archives talked about archives referenced in literature in a very engaging and thought-provoking way. It made me more aware of how archives are evident in many novels in one way or another. Fugitive Pieces (a truly great and inspiring book) is not particularly about archives but it resonates because it is about memory and history and understanding, and about the spaces, the emptiness, about what is missing…but then the absence is just as important as the presence in so many things, and not least in shaping and interpreting history. Archivists know this better than most, as they can be responsible for choosing what stays and what goes as far as documentary evidence is concerned, and they are responsible for deciding how to describe what exists, which has so much impact upon whether and how things are accessed and used, and arguably on how things are actually interpreted.

In some ways, archives represent history rather than memory because they are not consciously created to be research material – at least not in the sense that they may become historical evidence years into the future. When the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) wrote over 2,000 letters to his wife, particularly whilst he was in India designing New Delhi, he did not think about the letters being read nearly one hundred years hence, and used by social and architectural historians (at least we assume he did not). So, do letters such as these give us a piece of history? Do they represent the history rather than the memory? I have generally been inclined to think that archives are a means to access history in a direct way, as much as that is possible at all – they bring history closer because they are not an interpretation or an intellectualising of past events, but the stuff of past events. Having said that, reading a novel such as Fugitive Pieces, the past is brought to life and is given soul and emotion so effectively, and maybe that is really the life blood of history. In many ways its central theme is the holocaust, but rather than describing events, it just barely touches upon them. Yet the poignancy of the writing builds up emotions and empathy that seem to bring history to life far more palpably than facts could ever do.

Documents may not be emotional in themselves, but they can convey a great deal of emotion. Love letters may be obviously moving, and there may be expectation of the emotion that we should feel when reading them, but the simplest of texts – maybe a list of household goods or a hastily scribbled note, can also convey a great deal of feeling, especially if we know something of the context. This partly explains the continual importance that archivists place on provenance and the integrity of the whole archive. If we want to try to understand the feelings of past events, then it may be that the more context we have the better. But ironically by having so much context, the reality of a place in time will always elude us in the end; a broader perspective can draw us away from understanding the experience that the creator of the material might have felt.

When I worked as an archivist in a repository, I didn’t really muse on these things; now that I am surrounded by descriptions of archives without having to concern myself with the actual physical materials, it seems to encourage the occasional philosophical outburst. I think it has something to do with the fact that the descriptions are removed from the physical things and so I spend quite a bit of time thinking about them in abstract…or something along those lines.