Archival Description Research Articles

Archival Description Turns Truly Collaborative: an Exercise in Records in Contexts Standard

This paper presents an exercise and research conducted by the author at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zagreb University. It aimed to teach archival description subjects to his BA students and link results using the Records in Contexts (RIC) standard, RDF Turtle standard, and a graph database. The exercise spanned five weeks, during which students had to create the archival description of an exemplary records aggregation of notable historian Jaroslav Šidak, provided by the Faculty Archives. This exercise aimed to examine the potential of RIC and linked data technologies to facilitate collaboration among archivists, reduce the description-related work through decentralization, enable re-using and linking descriptions, and visualize results. The author offers a conclusion regarding collaborative work and creating new knowledge from archived heritage. Finally, some further directions regarding these subjects are being proposed.

Archival meta-metadata: revision history and positionality of finding aids

This article starts from two observations about archival description. First, creating finding aids requires significant judgment and interpretation, and is therefore inevitably influenced by the positionalities—the perspectives, personal histories, and social identities—of the archivists. Second, finding aids occasionally call for revision, sometimes to fit a new data standard or reflect an evolving collection, but also to correct errors, reduce bias, and remove harmful language. In light of these observations, this article has two aims. First, it develops and presents a theoretical rationale for recording metadata about finding aids, including revision history and authorship, arguing for transparency about positionality as a response to recognizing the infeasibility of impartiality. Second, it presents the results of a survey of state archivists in the US, who were asked about their descriptive practices and their attitudes regarding disclosing their authorship of finding aids. Results of the survey reveal diverse practices, as well as some hesitation to embrace expressions of positionality in the context of description. The article closes with a discussion of options for conceptualizing metadata about finding aids and the professional role of archivists, concluding with two general recommendations.

Case study: Accessioning and describing digital archival acquisitions using encoded archival description crosswalks

In 2021, the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries migrated to a new digital asset management system, Orange DAM, to administer its digital collections. The USC Libraries used this migration as an opportunity to improve its workflows for describing and enabling access to born-digital archival acquisitions. This case study examines the strengths and weaknesses of the USC Libraries’ past and current workflows for accessioning born-digital archival material. The case study focuses on the Libraries’ current workflow, which uses an Orange DAM export feature in conjunction with ArchivesSpace — an archives management application — to create and link the description of born-digital archival collections across USC’s discovery systems. The current workflow, created by the USC Libraries’ accessioning archivist in 2023, involves exporting metadata in an Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format from Orange DAM, editing the EAD using regular expressions, and then importing the description into an ArchivesSpace finding aid. While the current workflow prioritises expedited access over detailed description, it significantly improves the discoverability of new acquisitions of digital archives compared with previous workflows. Despite some duplication issues arising from the lack of built-in system integrations, this workflow strikes a balance between process efficiency and descriptive detail, aligning with the USC Libraries’ current operational limitations for managing digital archives.

Cataloging Architectural Drawings: Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age

The special approaches to cataloging architectural drawings that were developed in the analog era of printed catalogs have persisted for over half a century. But the growth of digital technology in more recent years has created new challenges and opportunities for custodians of architectural drawings that have yet to be fully explored. This article examines traditional approaches to cataloging architectural drawings in the United Kingdom, including the highly influential system developed at the Royal Institute of British Architects in the 1970s, alongside recent literature and examples of modern finding aids to reveal the impact that digital technology has had on the practice of archival description, together with the possibilities that new technology offers for presentation and access to online descriptions. By highlighting the key developments in digital cataloging and relating them to the medium of architectural drawings, this article will enable custodians of architectural collections to ensure that their catalogs are fit for purpose in the digital age.

The Path of Least Resistance: Optimizing Metadata Practices through User Assessment

As part of a multi-faceted research project examining user engagement with various types of descriptive metadata to improve metadata services, Utah State University Libraries Cataloging and Metadata Services unit investigated user search behavior in library catalog (MARC) records, Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids, and most recently in digital collection metadata. The authors used web log analysis to determine how users interacted with CONTENTdm, categories of search terms used, and where search terms were found in a record. Key findings included that navigation through CONTENTdm using clickable queries (links) is a prominent user search pattern, dates are an important faceting tool and date ranges as a clickable link are heavily used, users demonstrated a more engaged research pattern when searching with geographic terms, and subject and transcription metadata fields match user search terms at a significant rate and are likely to be high drivers of search results.

What Is a Lesbian Document? Platforming Archival Description, Documents, and History in Sweden

As Joanna Drucker (2014) convincingly argues, “Most information visualizations are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation" (p. 10). This article investigates the visuality and built-in argumentations of the Alvin interface for digitized Swedish cultural heritage, focusing on how the platform defines a document and the effects this definition has on the accessibility and interconnectedness of documents related to lesbian and feminist histories. This paper addresses how (failed) systematization and an emphasis on large quantities of documents and metadata breathes new life into outdated historiographies and renders documents and information related to feminist and lesbian histories and connections between these histories invisible. In doing so, platforms reinstitute divisions and stereotypes about feminist and lesbian history criticized by Adrienne Rich in her seminal essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Platform designers must begin to take seriously queer and feminist researchers' emphasis on context and the need to build flexibility, interconnectivity across private/public boundaries, fuzziness, and incompleteness into cultural heritage platforms from the outset.

Privacy of documents – documents of privacy. Remarks on personal sources in historical and archival studies

The authors set themselves the goal of indicating the places in the archival holdings where texts of a private nature are present. They used the ego-documentary theory developed in European science since the midtwentieth century. It makes us pay attention to narrative sources (diaries, journals, memoires, correspondence) in the first place. It also allows you to extract privacy from official sources in which a person is forced to tell the story of his life, express his individuality and identity. Court testimony is of particular importance in this context. It is an important component of the archival holdings, and at the same time the source basis for many fundamental scientific works on the history of the mentality of all social groups, including those marginalized. They notice untapped sources such as CVs (biographies) attached to official files or petitions submitted by private individuals to the authorities. They draw attention to the fact that all archival entities, such as fonds, collections or archive holdings, may be self-documentary in nature. This applies to private archives, but to some extent also official ones. It is a difficult problem to capture the private character of archives in the archival description. The authors indicate the usefulness of creating source and archival studies characteristics of classes of archival sources in terms of the possibility of ego-documentary research.

Optimization of Image Processing Algorithms for Character Recognition in Cultural Typewritten Documents

Linked data is used in various fields as a new way of structuring and connecting data. Cultural heritage institutions have been using linked data to improve archival descriptions and facilitate the discovery of information. Most archival records have digital representations of physical artifacts in the form of scanned images that are non-machine-readable. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) recognizes text in images and translates it into machine-encoded text. This article evaluates the impact of image processing methods and parameter tuning in OCR applied to typewritten cultural heritage documents. The approach uses a multi-objective problem formulation to minimize Levenshtein edit distance and maximize the number of words correctly identified with a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to tune the methods’ parameters. Evaluation results show that parameterization by digital representation typology benefits the performance of image pre-processing algorithms in OCR. Furthermore, our findings suggest that employing image pre-processing algorithms in OCR might be more suitable for typologies where the text recognition task without pre-processing does not produce good results. In particular, Adaptive Thresholding, Bilateral Filter, and Opening are the best-performing algorithms for the theater plays’ covers, letters, and overall dataset, respectively, and should be applied before OCR to improve its performance.

Migration Misadventures: The Challenges of Creating an Inter-Institutional Migration Plan

Archival institution migration projects are planned data transfers from existing data formats to more accessible formats that assist in preserving transferred data, improving information retrieval, and preventing obsolescence. Various archival institutions are increasingly planning migration projects because current technology makes the process easier and more affordable than in the past. In this proceeding, I will walk through the planning stages and associated challenges of NASA’s inter-institutional migration plan, Archival Description Center Migration Plans Project, which is part of a larger reorganization of the archives’ functional area to an Enterprise program. For this project, we utilized the open-source, standards-based, web-based applications Access to Memory and Archivematica. At the current project stage, we have collaborated with archivists from seven of the eleven existing NASA archive centers. One of the goals of this Enterprise reorganization is to facilitate cross-collection search and discovery and establish cross-institution metadata standards.

Archival users and AI tools for reference and access: a study within the InterPARES Trust AI project

Evaluating the effectiveness of search tools, the ease of use of the selection and display interfaces of archival descriptions and documents, and the satisfaction of end users are not everyday activities among archive service managers. A culture of quality should instead consider actual effectiveness, adopting a user-centred design and a systematic comparison with final users. Within the international project InterPARES Trust AI, focused on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on archival functions, specific studies have been activated on user access to archives and documents from the AI perspective. This contribution presents this project, its assumptions, objectives, and results and the first results of the study in Italy on users.

Extending RiC-O to Model Historical Architectural Archives: The ITDT Ontology

Historical architectural archives enjoy attention from diverse audiences, acting as a primary source of information for architects, historians, public authorities, and common citizens alike. In Italy, the interest in architectural archives has grown slowly but steadily for the last 20 years. However, architectural archives do not generally follow the trend common for museums and galleries in publishing digitized materials and providing standard metadata for individual records. The information that is available online usually includes only an archival finding aid, instead of metadata about the individual records, or fully digital versions of the records. While cataloguing standards for archival descriptions of architectural records have existed at least since the 1980s, the rise of Linked Open Data as a framework for publishing cultural heritage data has allowed archivists to enhance these archival descriptions with richer contextual information and links to external knowledge bases. In this paper we present the ITDT ontology, an extension of the Records in Contexts Ontology that facilitates the representation of architectural records and of the context related to architectural projects, its process, and participating entities. We discuss the application of the ontology to the project files of Italian architect and engineer Dino Tamburini (1924–2011), and the creation of a digital archive offering multiple perspectives over the records.

A metadata model for authenticity in digital archival descriptions

The advent of the information paradigm has shaken many of the principles of archival theory and practice. One key issue is knowing to which extent can digital information be trusted. Digital resources are represented by metadata, and trust consists in demonstrating their authenticity. Since the traditional elements used to verify the authenticity of analog records are not suitable in the digital world, the field faces a major challenge. The use of abundant, pertinent and constantly captured metadata seems to one of the most relevant solutions. This article aims to contribute to tackle this issue by setting the goal of proposing a model that attempts to include the most relevant metadata elements to capture the information that contributes for ascertaining the authenticity of digital archival descriptions. To that end, mixed methods methodology are employed. A qualitative documentary research is used to collect, analyze and interpret a corpus of scientific literature. As a complement, the quantitative technique requirements engineering is used to extract from international description standards the metadata requirements that can assist in the presumption of authenticity. Both approaches are then combined through a critical lens into a single unifying model for authenticity that is deemed as complete as necessary but as simple as possible. The model can be used by organizations or as a contribution to the discussion of authenticity and trustworthiness in digital archival descriptions.

Gossip as Practice, Gossip as Care

Often seen as suspect and untrustworthy, gossip as it is currently conceptualized comes from historic attempts by people who have experienced social marginalization to share information, build stronger relationships, and assess a dominant narrative against lived experience. In this article, I will be outlining how gossip has animated my archival work at the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archives, an artist-run centre in Vancouver, BC, and using the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archives as a case study. Several distinct uses of gossip emerge: these include offering space for archives workers to connect and build solidarity, opening up new avenues for reassessing what we consider to be relevant information in archival description, providing strategies for navigating sensitive information within collections, and acting as an alternative to narratives of trauma when considering archival silences. Drawing on practice theory and studies of community archives and deeply influenced by an ethos of transformative justice, this project is connected to the growing body of scholarly work that examines information and memory work through the lens of affect theory and a feminist ethics of care. This work contributes to the articulation of person-centred archival praxis by theorizing gossip as a tactic of care that trains the ear to better notice the experiences, complaints, and contributions of the people surrounding the records at hand.

From a Private Archive to a Public Museum

This paper describes a curator’s personal experience in a museum of art with several “auxiliary” archives of museum collections, in which various photographic objects are the most numerous. The paper underlines the issue of experts’ unpreparedness within museum institutions for managing and preserving photographic material, which is especially challenging when it exists in a heterogenous documentation cluster that has been reassembled multiple times. In an effort to preserve the conceptual integrity of the new/old archive, which will as much as possible mirror all earlier uses, interventions, manipulations, etc. of the material, as a sign of its pre- and post-acquisition biography (Edwards, Morton), and equally the history of the museum, it has been resorted to a top-to-bottom archival description that will reach the level of each individual item. In this way, the archival imperative of acknowledging the provenance and original order is not being betrayed, while at the same time we are ensuring the visibility of each individual photograph, which is described both as a document and as an artifact. Taking into consideration the fact that this kind of approach is not universally applicable, all of its recognized benefits and inherent limitations are presented. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the challenges of applying the same approach to a digital context.

Development of the Borobudur Conservation Archives services with ICA-AtoM

The Borobudur Conservation Office as a memory institution manages its archives and disseminates information about preserving the Borobudur Temple. The Borobudur Conservation Archives have also recognized as a Memory of the World by UNESCO in 2017. Therefore, developing a website using the ICA Atom platform based on open source is important for accessibility of the Borobudur Conservation Archives at the Borobudur Conservation Office. The purpose this study is explain how development of the Borobudur Conservation Archives accessed services through the ICA-AtoM platform with analysis the process of integrating digitized data and the development of the Borobudur Conservation Archives. This study used a qualitative approach with data collection methods: literature study, participatory observation, and interviews. A literature study used library sources related to the research topic. The participatory observation was conducted through fieldwork practices for two months, from 21 December 2020 to 26 February 2021, at the Borobudur Conservation Office. This study used structured and unstructured interviews. The study result was that the development of the ICA-AtoM design had been adapted to the needs of the Borobudur Conservation Office. From the aspect of usage, the developed website https://arsip.borobudurpedia.id has met user needs with standards issued by the International Council on Archives (ICA) and metadata standards. In conclusion, the development of the ICA AtoM platform version 2.5 and the creation of archival information contextualized as shared content for users with evidentiary value, informational value, and intrinsic value are uploaded to the website, including archival descriptions, authority records, and archival institutions.

From Record to Data. New purposes for Archival Description processes

The archival description has undergone a long process of development and standardization. The work of the Experts Group on Archival Description in developing the Records in Contexts (RiC-CM) and Records in Contexts Ontology (RiC-O) models has contributed to rekindling reflection on the integration of archival description into broader information retrieval systems which could potentially facilitate the dissemination of knowledge. The contribution attempts to reflect on the potential and possible critical issues in semantic data modeling from an integrated description perspective, inviting greater reflection on the design and on the management of possible digital information restitution environments.

Non-Destructive Identification and Characterization of Crystopal, A Novel Mid-Twentieth Century Plastic

Crystopal is a mechanically strong yet highly decorative plastic with a translucent and crackled appearance that was produced in the 1960s by the artist and plastics engineer Armand G. Winfield (1919–2009) and his company, Crystopal, Ltd. Many of Winfield’s collected plastic objects are housed within the Syracuse University Libraries, but some lack complete archival descriptions, including plastic compositions. To address this, the non-invasive and non-destructive determination of the polymer identities in Winfield’s artifacts was performed by Raman spectroscopy. Our studies generally begin with the database matching of an artifact spectrum to that of a polymer standard, but when objects known to be fabricated from Crystopal were analyzed, a database of over 100 representative polymers failed to yield the chemical identity of the plastic. However, the Raman spectrum of Crystopal displayed a unique chemical fingerprint that revealed it to be composed of an unsaturated polyester crosslinked with styrene. This Raman spectrum was added to the database and used as reference for the unambiguous identification of Crystopal artifacts, distinguishing them from decorative plastics with similar appearances. The addition of Crystopal to the polymer database provides a pathway toward establishing artifact provenance and preserving objects crafted from this unique and decorative plastic.

Buildings of Texas

This note describes an ongoing project at the University of Texas Libraries (UTL) that is transforming the way we think about place, people, and events in managing archival collections. This project was developed around a dataset donated by architectural historians, Gerald Moorhead and Mario Sánchez to the Alexander Architectural Archives. This dataset was collected by a team of researchers studying architecturally significant buildings for the two-volume publication, Buildings of Texas. Our team at UT Libraries has used it as a test-bed for geolocating built works in Texas and mapping our Architectural collections. This dataset presented a clear opportunity to develop map-based digital exhibitions and finding aids for archival material, but also posed several challenges due to naming ambiguities, vague building location descriptions, and repeated references to people and architectural firms that were difficult to disambiguate and interconnect. In an attempt to overcome these challenges and develop a set of methods for dealing with similar and related collections, our cross-disciplinary team is evaluating ways to develop a flat spreadsheet into a collection of inter-related datasets. Our goal was a system that could be managed more flexibly, be easily represented through spatial and non-spatial visualizations, and—crucially—contain references to concepts and typologies defined in widely-used ontologies. We have also sought ways to contribute our data as a local authority to both the Getty vocabularies and Wikidata, as a means to broaden representation and allow for multivocality and multiplicity. We have found unique advantages to a team-approach to the cleaning and data normalization process that transformed a single spreadsheet into a graph database. Our experimentation in this process has facilitated our own visualization of the connections between places, people, and events and, in turn, has informed the way we will present this material in our online exhibitions. In addition to the graph database, we explored traditional relational database technologies, which turned out to be much easier to use for mapping the data and managing it with GIS software. Throughout the project, we have been mindful of breaking down traditional modes of archival description, of contributing to but also looking beyond perceived authorities, and about the value of the work we do for architectural artifacts and landscapes, but also any cultural heritage community of practice seeking to meaningfully describe artifacts, events, people, and places over time.

Theories and implications for centering Indigenous and queer embodiment within sociotechnical systems

AbstractThis paper explores the role of Indigenous and queer embodiment in understanding the current limitations of sociotechnical systems as they relate to cultural heritage institutions. Through the utilization of a critical case study the paper highlights the ways in which the ideologies of colonialism and cisnormativity render Indigenous and queer identities invisible within cultural heritage institutions. In particular, the case studies highlight information organization, archival description, and cataloging as sites of ideological reinforcement for colonialism and gender binaries. In response, the paper identifies methods for not only naming such normative ideologies, but actionable ways to challenge such inequities through community‐led, Indigenous, and queer affirming descriptive practices. Additionally, the paper attends to the way findings impact other historically marginalized identities and theorize methods for confronting such inequities within sociotechnical systems more broadly.

Heritage Building Information Modeling (HBIM) of the ruined and damaged architectural heritage in Upper Kama Region (Russia)

Building Information Modeling is a tool for the disappearing architectural heritage and environment recreation in 3D virtual reality. The article presents the information modeling experience of ruined and damaged architectural heritage, located in theUpper Kama region in the north Perm Kray (Russia) . The Scan to HBIM technology applied for modeling: information modeling based on laser scanning and a photogrammetric survey. The challenges of the work process are specified. Using the collected data (archival documents and engineering survey results), the parameters of each building's elements are supplemented with information about the history, damage, transformation, and condition of structures and architectural elements. Historic photographs helped to restore the buildings' 3D appearance. Archival descriptions provide the colour and coating materials' characteristics. Full-fledged virtual copies of ruined Orthodox churches of the Upper Kama region were created. The article proposes further work using obtained 3D-information models, including gamification, and virtual and augmented reality.Keywords: Architectural Heritage; Heritage Building Information Modeling; Laser scanning; Virtual reconstruction.