Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines

Last Friday (29th January), I attended this excellent conference / symposium organized by postgraduate students from HATII (the Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute) and elsewhere in Glasgow University's Arts and Humanities graduate School.

While the papers ranged far beyond what is generally considered to be the boundaries of the recordkeeping disciplines, much of the material was of at least contextual interest to the work of recordkeeping professionals, and some of it directly relevant.

The programme was split into three panels, under the thematic headings of 'Madeleines', 'Machines', and 'Monuments'. After tea and Madeleines (in homage to Proust's famous 'memory moment'), the day's business started with a keynote speech on 'Hand, Writing and Memory' from Dr Mariangela Palladino of the University of Glasgow.

The papers presented in the 'Madeleines' panel were all related in some way to the manner in which memory, as opposed to specific memories or memorials, is psychologically constructed and organized - Aislinn Hunter's paper on the resonance of 'beloved objects', though focusing on museum or heritage objects, is also readily applicable to the way in which iconic documents and records are viewed.

The 'Machines' panel explored, as one mught imagine, some of the uses or effects of technology in constructing memory and memorials. A couple focused on 'technological' memorials (a video installation of a Thai village which had suffered in past conflicts, a 'Sonic Memorial' of the Twin Towers); while readers of Derrida's 'Archive Fever' will be familiar with the terms in which Galit Wellner discussed the mobile phone as 'memory prosthesis'.

The final panel on 'Monuments' perhaps provided the closest analogues to recordkeeping. Two of the papers showed how the past could be tendentiously re-written or re-presented to back current political and ideological concerns (in one case, by physical monuments, in the other, through literature). A third dealt with a case where the published version of a work differed in certain key respects from the earlier private version, and considered possible reasons for this re-writing of the record (or at any rate, of the earlier interpretation).
Finally, Maria Francesca Martinez Tagliavia provided an exhilarating analysis of Blob, a short mash-up feature used as a filler on the Italian Rai Tre TV channel, which weaves a range of documentary and non-documentary material into a new video text of ironic, iconoclastic commentary in the belly of the Berlusconi-dominated beast.

This brief report can give only the barest sense of the complexity and richness of the papers and discussions; fortunately, an edited volume of proceedings is likely to be published at a later stage. In the meanwhile, a full list of speakers and abstracts, along with further details on the nature of the symposium in the Call for Papers, is available at event's Facebook group pages.

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.

AC+erm at the RMS Conference

We were delighted to have been given the opportunity of speaking about the AC+erm Project at last month’s Records Management Society Conference in Brighton. Thanks and praise are due to the conference organizer, Heather Jack, not only for giving us a captive audience but also for putting together such a varied and interesting mix of topics and speakers. It was a very good conference, with a definite air of purpose and confidence among delegates.

The talk given on behalf of the team by Rachel Hardiman was included in the ‘Transformation and Change’ strand of the conference. Entitled Transformation through research? The AC+erm project, it is now available in a slightly amended form on our project website at http://tinyurl.com/q3xw2h. (You can see a list of all the presentations we have given on the project, most of them with accompanying slides, at http://tinyurl.com/qa579n.)

One aspect of the conference that was particularly heartening for us was the strong showing from the academic side of our discipline. As well as AC+erm and Elizabeth Lomas’ Continued Communication project from Northumbria, there were sessions run by colleagues from Glasgow and Aberystwyth Universities, and the AC+erm presentation was ably and genially chaired by Alan Bell of Dundee University. It was heartening not simply because it provided a wider audience for research work but because I believe that it marks a significant step on the road towards a real and exciting synergy between theory and practice.

Although the pressure of time (we are now deep into our final Delphi study on the systems and technology facet of ERM) does not allow for a comprehensive or even an impressionistic review of the conference, I’d like to highlight two sessions which made an impact for quite different reasons.

The first was Heather Brooke’s opening keynote address on freedom of information. Heather is a crusading journalist of the classic type, who is largely responsible for lifting the lid off the unsavoury cauldron of the MPs’ expenses issue. Her impassioned and solidly argued demands for openness and accountability in the public realm – and her comparisons between the expectation of these in the US and the secrecy and obfuscation built into the system here in the UK – reminded us that we are only the stewards and not the controllers of the information that passes through our hands. We have societal as well as career and professional obligations, and should never forget that the information and records held by public bodies are the property of citizens not the state bureaucracy, and that public servants should be just that.

The second was a very different affair, and in fact a session which I stumbled upon by accident, as my first choice was full by the time I tried to book a place. Under the title ‘Don’t forget about the structure in the EDRM’ – which fooled everybody, since it in fact referred to the other EDRM – Courtney Fletcher and Liam Ferguson from Mesirow Financial Consulting gave an informative, breezy and entertaining presentation on the need to consider structured data systems when engaged in electronic discovery (yes, that ED). The reason I choose to highlight it is that it came as a useful reminder that so much RIM activity is focused on unstructured information that it is easy to forget that many business-critical records actually take the form of data in structured systems, even if they do not conform to the ‘correct’ definitions of records according to the manuals and standards.

All in all, April’s conference must be marked down as a success for the RMS, and left many looking forward already to next year’s, which will take place in Manchester.

Back to the Future - RMS Conference 19-21 April 2009

It's good to read that Northumbria's research gets a mention in Martin Sanderson's review of the recent Records Management Society Conference - Back to the Future(http://blog.tfpl.com/tfpl/2009/05/records-management-society-conference-april-2009-back-to-the-future.html)

Rachel Hardiman gave a presentation on the AC+erm project, outlining what the project is about, how we are doing it and the type of outputs to date, including vignettes (or tools) we are drafting. She demonstrated the idea of scripting a training video with the first two AC+erm 'movie stars' - Lancelot and Guinevere - using xtranormal's free Text-to-Movie (TM) movie-making software (http://www.xtranormal.com/) She asked delegates for input to a short film aimed at records and information managers to get across ways in which to apply ERM methodologies that suit the users rather than themselves.

Some of Elizabeth Lomas' co-researchers gave a presentation around her PhD study called 'Continued Communication', which Martin highlights as "new and innovative action/participative research". Elizabeth also gave her own presentation on aligning records management, risk and information security standards and models, based on her extensive professional experience.

Reading reports like this helps us understand the impact the project is having and the feedback is important for the work we do to the end of the project. We'll try to respond to it. Thank you.