Development Of Digital Archives Research Articles

A CHALLENGING TASK FOR JOURNALISM HISTORIANS: THE CULTURAL TURN AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE OTTOMAN/TURKISH PRESS

This article critically evaluates the historiography of the Ottoman/Turkish press and seeks to shed light on the debates in journalism history triggered by James Carey's call for a “cultural history of journalism.” It argues that participating in these debates is crucial at a time when the history of journalism is on the cusp of a ‘digital turn’. For the first time since the early 20th century, the development of digital archives and the technologies that support them has significantly increased global interest in the history of journalism. The widespread use of digital archives will gradually transform the narrative of scarcity into one of abundance. Nonetheless, transforming this interest into a productive process of historical knowledge production requires researchers to rethink their epistemic relationship with the Ottoman press. This article argues that the ‘digital turn’ offers a crucial opportunity to add new pieces to the history of Ottoman journalism. However, for these pieces to coalesce, journalism historians must take the previously neglected path of the ‘cultural turn’.

It is a Matter of Perspectives

Digitalization and technological developments lead to increased expectations of instant access to archives and archival information. Concurrently, archival information systems and access tools are becoming more advanced, which opens new arenas for possible users and use in the archival domain. Research on the development of digital archives, finding aids, and archival interfaces, highlight the importance of reflecting the understanding of user needs, behaviors, expectations, and their use of technology. The current study, based on a systematic literature review with thematic analysis, addresses the multiple perspectives of users and their use in the archival context. The results show that a ‘user’ is a complex and heterogeneous conceptualization, pragmatically adapted depending on perspectives and contexts. Studies of users and use are strongly bound to their context and the current study further highlights the question of if and how users and use can be viewed outside of their contexts. Research points to a more individual perspective where different user studies and methods explore the user’s cognition and perception to paint a picture of what a user understands and how they use archival records.

Collection Development of Digital Archives in India: A Case Study of Jadavpur University

The free flow of information is a fundamental principle for bridging the gaps between have and have not. ICT has a major impact of materials for research. Innovationin ICT has brought radical changes in the way information is generated, stored, processed and disseminated. Recent advances in converging technologies especially Internet and web technology has paved the way to create the open access archives on repositories. The objective of the open access movement is to make scholarly articles freely available in digital form to anyone anywhere in the world. The open access and open archives movement, the need for changes in the scholarly communication to remove barriers to access.

Sharing and storing digital cultural records in Central Australian Indigenous communities

This article considers how Indigenous peoples in Central Australia share and keep digital records of events and cultural knowledge in a period of rapid technological change. To date, research has focused upon the development of digital archives and platforms that reflect Indigenous epistemologies and incorporation of protocols governing access to information. Yet there is scant research on how individuals with little access to such media share and hold—or not, as the case may be—digital cultural information. After surveying current enabling infrastructures in Central Australia, we examine how materials are held and shared when people do not have easy access to databases and the Internet. We analyze examples of practices of sharing materials to draw out issues that arise in managing storage and circulation of cultural records via Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives, mobile phones, and other devices. We consider how the affordances of various platforms support, extend, and/or challenge Indigenous socialities and ontologies.

Architectural heritage semantic 3D documentation in multi-scale standard maps

Abstract The documentation of cultural heritage is acknowledged as a fundamental instrument to guarantee the monument preservation and promotion, and to educate people towards these aims. The recently evolved potentialities of information technologies and communication (standard data models, ontologies and formats, web technologies) permit the development of digital archives in which the information is also semantically specified in a shared and explicit way, so that it can be universally understood and correctly interpreted. However, some tools are missing for suitably archiving and communicating the architectural heritage information, including the representation potentialities of high-level-of-detail 3D models. A goal of this study is the suitable representation of both the thematic information about architectural heritage and its 3D geometric characteristics in an interoperable and understandable way. For this reason, the existing data models, available for the geometric and cartographic field, and for the cultural heritage domain, were considered. They are distinct standards, and some limits make them incomplete (in the spatial or semantic management). In this study, an extension is proposed of the standard data model CityGML to overcome these limits. CityGML is published by the Open Geospatial Consortium to represent urban objects and permits a multi-scale management of the information useful for the representation of architectural heritage multi-faceted, multi-temporal, complex knowledge. In the paper, the extension is described, and an example of its application on a portion of a highly detailed 3D model of a mediaeval church is presented.

Epistemic Consequences of Bibliometrics-based Evaluation: Insights from the Scientific Community

The aim of this paper is to investigate the consequences of the bibliometrics-based evaluation system of scientific production on the contents and methods of sciences. The research has been conducted by means of in-depth interviews to a multi-disciplinary panel of Italian researchers. We discuss the implications of bibliometrics-based evaluation on the choice of the research topic, on the experimental practices, on the dissemination habits. We observe that the validation of the bibliometrics-based evaluation practices relies on the acceptance and diffusion within the scientific community, and that these practices are self-sustained through their wide application. We discuss possible evolving scenarios, also considering the recent development of digital archives.

Applying the technology acceptance model in a study of the factors affecting usage of the Taiwan digital archives system

The rapid development of information and communication technology and the popularization of the Internet have given a boost to digitization technologies. Since 2001, The National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan has invested a large amount of funding in the National Digital Archives Program (NDAP) to develop digital content. Some studies have indicated that most respondents had no confidence in particular digital archive websites. Thus, with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a theoretical basis, the focus of the present study was to identify the factors influencing usage. Extension of the roles of perceived playfulness and interface design was also explored to identify the reasons that digital archives might not be accepted by some users. The present study used a random sampling method to distribute questionnaires to digital archive users via e-mail. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method was used to verify the appropriateness of the study model and whether the hypotheses were confirmed. Study results indicated that the ''interface design'' is an important factor that influences people to use the digital archives, and that it is separate from the ''human factor'' and the ''human-computer interface'' (HCI). Moreover, the results showed that HCI had a significant impact on the ''perceived ease of use'' and on ''usage intentions.'' However, the human factor interface showed a significant impact only on ''perceived ease of use.'' With respect to the hypotheses regarding ''usage intentions,'' the ''perceived usefulness,'' ''perceived ease of use,'' ''attitude,'' and ''perceived playfulness'' were not related to ''usage intentions.'' Therefore, it is necessary to consider the quality of interface design in the development of digital archives in order to promote usage.

Building a digital future: enabling the development of digital archives in Australia and New Zealand

The National Archives of Australia's digital archiving programme has been in operation since 2006. During this time, the organisation has shared with the international archival community its practical experiences, technical output and lessons learned in building and managing a digital archive. Less well known than the products and experiences (or the ‘what’) of digital archiving is the ‘how’: the circumstances and processes that enabled the development of the digital archive in the first place. These include various funding processes for public moneys and timely government initiatives supporting and promoting sustainable digital preservation. This paper looks at the circumstances surrounding the development of digital archives in five jurisdictions - the Australian Government, the New Zealand Government and the Australian State Government jurisdictions of Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. It describes the experiences of these institutions in seeking funding, leveraging existing government strategi...

Victorian Print Culture, Journalism and the Novel

A number of studies have challenged the divide between Victorian literature and journalism in recent years by rethinking the relationship between enduring literary genres such as the novel and ephemeral forms of print including newspapers and magazines. This essay identifies the key ways in which studies in print culture and book history have revised our understanding of the 19th-century literary marketplace by identifying a high degree of interaction between the era’s literature and journalism. The essay begins with an introduction to print culture as a field of research that has challenged the narrow literary focus of Victorian studies by expanding its borders to include the eclectic assortment of journalistic writing representative of the 19th century. It then considers how the development of digital archives has improved access to the full range of reading materials once available to audiences. The essay concludes with an assessment of how attention to the entire spectrum of print consumed by the reading public has inspired a critical revaluation of the relationship between journalism and the Victorian novel.

The Rise of Periodical Studies

Within or alongside the larger field of print culture, a new area for scholarship is emerging in the humanities and the more humanistic social sciences: periodical studies. This development is being driven by the cultural turn in departments of language and literature, by the development of digital archives that allow for such studies on a broader scale than ever before, and by what the producers of the Spectator Project have called “the special capabilities of the digital environment” (Center). Literary and historical disciplines engaged with the study of modern culture are finding in periodicals both a new resource and a pressing challenge to existing paradigms for the investigation of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and modern cultures. The forms of this new engagement range from Cary Nelson's suggestion, in Repression and Recovery, that periodicals should be read as texts that have a unity different from but comparable with that of individual books (219) to the organization of groups like the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, founded in 1968, and the more recently established Research Society for American Periodicals. Every year new books are appearing that emphasize peri–odicals and investigate the ways in which modern literature and the arts are connected to the culture of commerce and advertising and to the social, political, and scientific issues of the time.