Archives in the 21st Century: A brief report from the Society of Archivists Conference

Last week, I was at the (UK) Society of Archivists Conference in Bristol to deliver a paper on the AC+erm Project. It was, alas, literally a flying visit, and travel constraints prevented me from immersing myself in what looked like a varied and fascinating programme put together by the SoA conference team.

The AC+erm paper was one of three in a session entitled 'Archives in the 21st Century', the other two speakers being Steve Bailey of JISC InfoNet and Dr Karen Gracy of Kent State University. It provided an overview of the project and shone the spotlight on some of the findings from our recent e-Delphi study on the Systems and Technology aspects of managing e-records. In keeping with the session theme, it focused on three of the many issues coverd by the Delphi study: Web 2.0 technologies, Cloud Computing, and e-mail.

I'm not actually going to say much about my own paper here, as the slides are now available on our website; instead I'd like to briefly give a flavour of the session as a whole and outline some of the matters covered by Steve and Karen in their lively and informative talks.

Meet the future of records management: www.amazon.co.uk
Steve Bailey spoke on a theme he continues to explore and raise in our profession: the need for records profesisonals to adapt to a new technological world, both by tearing themselves away from principles and practices that are still, fundamentally, paper-based, and by learning from the flexible and sophisticated tools of the new technologies to create better ways and means of managing records. He has successfully publicized these and other issues in his book, Managing the Crowd (Facet: 2008).

Taking the familiar and ubiquitous example of Amazon, Steve showed how much of the functionality of Amazon's data and information management framework could not only be adapted for, but could significantly enhance, management of electronic records. This sort of approach was essential in a world where the sheer volume of electronic records / information made 'traditional' management impossible.

Predictive searching, user review and ranking, even reviews of reviews could all work to both manage and get a sophisticated picture of information and information flows. When looking for a given book on Amazon, we do not navigate via the categorization hierarchy available on the site, but through direct input of title or auithor to the search field, where a number of extended search terms are also automatically generated to help narrow the field. This is a far more intuitive way of looking for something, whether a book or a business record, than via a classification scheme or file-plan.

Classification itself could be refined and made more useful by allowing user tags. Functions such as 'people who bought his item also bought' could be used to help users identify not only the spcific records they needed, but also any related items or series, and which other staff or units had also used or conuslted these records. This sort of high-level information could be used for management purposes as well, as could the whole 'mashable' ethos of Web 2.0 fucntionality and use. Steve spoke also about the ability all this offered of harnessing the 'wisdom of the crowd'.

Though Steve's focus was more on the user experience and on the flexibility of the Amazon website's functionality, he did note that there was some structure behind it that Amazon as a company rather than the user might find of use, such as the categorization scheme. What struck me as the presentation went on was that the two things were not at all counterposed, and that the 'traditional' elements of classification and assignation of standardized metadata were just as important as the search and use aspects. What we need to bear in mind is that they were not necessarily both important to the same constituencies, nor equally important in different contexts, and I think it is this that (some) records professionals may have been slow to react to.

Processes and structures that are vital to Amazon in managing their stock and their business flows are of no interest to the user; this does not mean that they are not critical to Amazon's information management. The structure, the rigour, the hierarchy must still be there – it just does not need to be the principal entry point to the system for the user (though it should always be available as an alternative). But I would certainly agree with Steve that, if they are to be truly useful, usable and (above all) used, electronic records management systems need to look and feel very different from what we see now – and that the Amazon model is a very good reference point against which to set our sights.

De Facto Archiving: The Use of Social Networking Sites for Collection Building and Preservation
Karen Gracy's talk dealt with processes and needs seemingly far removed from the management of electronic business records, but that were equally affected and challenged by the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies. Specializing in the various technical and cultural aspects of the preservation and curation of moving images, she examined the particular problems encountered by institutions with holdings of such material in a 'YouTube age'.

The issues were complex, with many oppositiosn and tensions that are not capable of straightforward resolution. Whereas with still digital images, a certain amount of standardization and best practice has emerged (e.g. JPEG 2000), this is still in its infancy in the context of moving images. It is so prohibitively expensive to produce digital versions of a quality comparable to the analogue originals that 'archival-quality' digitization projects of any extent are effectively not an option.

Nor are the difficulties faced in letting holdings out 'into the wild' purely technical. Tensions between (public and unmediated) access and (institutional) control do not rest on simple antitheses based, say, on ownership: Karen spoke of worries about the re-use of decontextualized moving images in the public domain and the loss of institutional authority if practices such as user tagging are given or seen to have a weight comparable to that of the professional expertise and knowledge offered by archives, museums, etc.

There can be a certain naivety in assuming that Web 2.0 technologies provided by commercial providers are a suitable vehicle for broadening access to or even providing an alternative repository for institutional collections. While institutions may have been correct in accepting that commercial offerings are more advanced and flexible than anything they could develop themselves, they still have to grapple with issues of ownership and of what happens to both content and the rights to it if a service closes down. This is most worrying where a decision has been made (and Karen gave examples) to use a comemrcial web-based service (YouTube) not just to store copies for access but to actually constitute the only repository for a moving image collection. Converting high-quality film to low-quality digital versions, posting the the latter to YouTube, and then ceasing to care for the former is highly questionable from the perspective of long-term preservation.

Karen's presentation also covered other aspects and emphases and included examples and statistics relating to the use of Web 2.0 in the context of moving images. It was both informative and thought-provoking, and showed that while comparisons might be made with the way in which archives make use of Web 2.0 technologies in the context of still images, there are some significant impediments (as well as opportunities) to adopting the same approach with moving images.

Conclusion
Both Steve's and Karen's talks looked in detail at issues that have been touched upon in AC+erm, but which have not emerged as topics for more intensive investigation – not because they are peripheral or without merit, but because they lie outside (current) core practice and processes within electronic records management (ERM). Because of this, the three talks complemented each other well, and their juxtaposition meant that they could be viewed as connected rather than artificially separated aspects of the challenges thrown up by digital technologies. The differnt approaches of research-based findings and 'thinking outside the box' also worked well together.

To be hopelessly reductive: Steve dealt with the 'now' of internet business practice, looking at IT capabilities and ways of organizing information that should be (but generally are not) adopted and adapted for use by recordkeeping professionals. It is a world of virtual social interaction, mash-ups, aggregation of information, the 'wisdom of the crowd'.

Karen's perspective and concerns were more archival, looking at the issues surrounding both preserving and making available the holdings of archival moving image collections in digital form. The Web 2.0 approaches advocated by Steve are at once highly seductive and fraught with complexity in this arena, in a much more problematic interplay of contesting perspectives.

My presentation dealt with the views of experts in records and information management working within organisational contexts generally coloured by more 'mainstream' approaches to ERM, where the issue of long-time preservation is recognized but seldom within the remit of ERM projects, and where e-mail rather than the newer technologies still constitutes the truly intractable business recordkeeping problem.

In each of the three presentations, the speaker dwelt on both the difficulties and opportunities offered to our disciplines and professions by the contemporary technological environment. From listening to what Steve and Karen had to say, and to the speakers from the floor in the discussion session afterwards, it seems clear to me that any progress to be made must involve a degree of re-imagination in our management and even conceptualization of the 'stuff' for which we are responsible, so that these (and other) currently disparate strands become woven into the same fabric. The energy and focus of this conference certainly suggests that there is no lack of will to rise to the challenge.