Online Access in Archives as a Challenge for Archives, Archivists and Archival Material: An Evaluation of Viewpoint a Group of Archivists

Günümüzde, online erişim özellikle teknolojik yenilikleri takip eden ve avantajlarından faydalanan yeni nesil kullanıcılar için temel bir gereklilik olmuştur. Online erişim aynı zamanda hem arşivler hem de kullanıcılar için birçok fayda sağlamaktadır. Online erişim sadece zaman tasarrufu sağlamamakta aynı zamanda daha ok kullanıcıya daha fazla malzeme sunmakta ve arşivcinin iş yükünü hafifletmektedir. Bu nedenle, online erişim arşivler için önemli bir süreçtir. Günümüzde, diğer birçok tekniğin yanında arşiv malzemesinin dijitalleştirilmesi üzerinde durulmaktadır, bunun da ötesinde arşiv malzemesine online erişim için programlar uygulanmaktadır. Online erişimin tüm avantajlarına rağmen, online erişim arşivler, arşivciler veya arşiv malzemesi için bir tehdit unsuru olabilir mi? Bu noktada, akla gelen başlıca tehdit unsurları arşiv malzemesinin güvenliği, referans arşivcilerinin geleceği ve kurum olarak arşivlerin, arşiv bilincinin hafızalardan silinmesi olarak sıralanabilir. Arşivlerin tehdit unsurlarından en az seviyede etkilenmeleri için potansiyel tehdit unsurlarının detaylı bir şekilde analiz edilmesi gerekmektedir. Bu bağlamda, çalışma kapsamında online erişimin potansiyel tehdit unsurları belirlenmektedir. Bu noktada, çalışmada 53 arşivcinin katıldığı bir anket uygulaması gerçekleştirilmiştir. Anket ile online erişimin avantajları, dezavantajları, potansiyel tehdit unsurları araştırılmış ve elde edilen sonuçlar ışığında online erişim arşivler, arşivciler ve arşiv malzemesi için bir tehdit olarak ele alınmıştır.Today, online access has become an essential requirement, especially for new-generation users who follow and take advantage of technological innovations. Online access also provides a number of advantages both for archives and users; not only does it save time, but it also offers more materials to more users and eases the archivist’s workload. For this reason, the issue under discussion is an important process for the archives. Today in most archives, in addition to many other techniques, the digitization of archival material is being carried out; moreover, programs are being implemented to provide online access for archival material. However, despite all the advantages that online access offers, the question whether online access present a challenge for archives, archivists or archival material needs to be asked? At this point, the first challenges that come to mind are the security of the archival material, the future of reference archivists and archives as institutions, and archival awareness being erased from the public memory. The potential challenges of online access should be analyzed in detail in order to ensure that archives are affected to the minimum. In this context, this study determines the potential challenges of the online access process. At this point in the study, a survey-study with 53 archivists was carried out, investigating what the advantages, disadvantages and potential challenges of the online access process are; in the light of the results, online access will be examined as a challenge for archives, archivists or archival material

Letter from a teenage accounting clerk in 1846: A Hidden voice in a micro-history of modern public accountancy

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate use of archival material to access a hidden voice in accounting history and provide social context in the form of a biographical micro-history of public accountancy. The archival material is a letter written in 1846 by a Scottish teenage public accountancy clerk. An analysis of the letter gives insight to the employment and social life of the clerk in mid-19th century Scotland and also identifies a notorious character in Scottish public accountancy. The paper reveals the importance of social connections, religion, communication, and transport to middle-class Victorian Scots and, more generally, reminds accounting historians of the value of hidden voices and micro-histories

Copyright Ownership to Historical Contents in the Open

In this paper we discuss the various steps followed while creating an open access repository of historical material available at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics using DSpace. While uploading these materials we have come across various copyright issues, which are not clearly addressed by the Indian copyright act of 1957. Moreover the Indian copyright act pertaining to digital contents is still not complete to include the historical contents. Some of these issues are understood in the context of copyright laws prevalent in other countries. Archival collections of IIA Open Access Repository are classified under the communities; (1) Archival collections, (2) Research papers in journals where IIA is the publisher (3) News paper clippings, (4) Photographs. This paper mainly elaborates on the procedure followed according to the ownership of the materials available with us and also those, which are transferred to us by the relatives of the original authors. The procedures also include the efforts made to trace the possible owners of the contents for copyright clearance. This paper also focuses on the basic principle, that holding an archival material does not automatically give the library copyright ownership. It creates an awareness among library personnel regarding the legal aspects of archiving historical contents like old newspaper cuttings, photographs, letters and handwritten manuscripts

Record Linking in the EHRI Portal

International audiencePurpose This paper aims to describe the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project's ongoing efforts to virtually integrate trans-national archival sources via the reconstruction of collection provenance as it relates to copy collections (material copied from one archive to another) and the co-referencing of subject and authority terms across material held by distinct institutions. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a case study of approximately 6,000 words length. The authors describe the scope of the problem of archival fragmentation from both cultural and technical perspectives, with particular focus on Holocaust-related material, and describe, with graph-based visualisations, two ways in which EHRI seeks to better integrate information about fragmented material. Findings As a case study, the principal contributions of this paper include reports on our experience with extracting provenance-based connections between archival descriptions from encoded finding aids and the challenges of co-referencing access points in the absence of domain-specific controlled vocabularies. Originality/value Record linking in general is an important technique in computational approaches to humanities research and one that has rightly received significant attention from scholars. In the context of historical archives, however, the material itself is in most cases not digitised, meaning that computational attempts at linking must rely on finding aids which constitute much fewer rich data sources. The EHRI project’s work in this area is therefore quite pioneering and has implications for archival integration on a larger scale, where the disruptive potential of Linked Open Data is most obvious

Damage function for historic paper. Part I: Fitness for use

Background In heritage science literature and in preventive conservation practice, damage functions are used to model material behaviour and specifically damage (unacceptable change), as a result of the presence of a stressor over time. For such functions to be of use in the context of collection management, it is important to define a range of parameters, such as who the stakeholders are (e.g. the public, curators, researchers), the mode of use (e.g. display, storage, manual handling), the long-term planning horizon (i.e. when in the future it is deemed acceptable for an item to become damaged or unfit for use), and what the threshold of damage is, i.e. extent of physical change assessed as damage. Results In this paper, we explore the threshold of fitness for use for archival and library paper documents used for display or reading in the context of access in reading rooms by the general public. Change is considered in the context of discolouration and mechanical deterioration such as tears and missing pieces: forms of physical deterioration that accumulate with time in libraries and archives. We also explore whether the threshold fitness for use is defined differently for objects perceived to be of different value, and for different modes of use. The data were collected in a series of fitness-for-use workshops carried out with readers/visitors in heritage institutions using principles of Design of Experiments. Conclusions The results show that when no particular value is pre-assigned to an archival or library document, missing pieces influenced readers/visitors’ subjective judgements of fitness-for-use to a greater extent than did discolouration and tears (which had little or no influence). This finding was most apparent in the display context in comparison to the reading room context. The finding also best applied when readers/visitors were not given a value scenario (in comparison to when they were asked to think about the document having personal or historic value). It can be estimated that, in general, items become unfit when text is evidently missing. However, if the visitor/reader is prompted to think of a document in terms of its historic value, then change in a document has little impact on fitness for use

Artificial Intelligence and the Preservation of Historic Documents

In recent decades, digitization has been presented as an important strategy both for the preservation of historic documents and for giving increased access for researchers to such materials. In the Norwegian context, this has not only implied the digitization of printed matter but also the digitization of audiovisual material like photography and analog tape recordings. From a technical perspective, there are of cause difficulties in digitizing such a variety of material when considering the diversity of media formats dating back to the nineteenth century. However, from the archival community criticism has been raised not only about the quality of the work but also the concerning the selection process, the organization of the material, and the collection of metadata. The National Library of Norway, especially, has attempted to avoid the problem of selection by attempting to digitize all of visual, sonic and audio-visual culture heritage. But this has created even greater challenges for the organization and registration of metadata. This is an issue that is apparent to the National Library, so it is looking into the possibility of using artificial intelligence – learning algorithms – to organize the material. The key issue is that the preservation of historic material is also dependent on the preservation of context and on metadata enabling us to interpret and understand the material at hand

Artificial Intelligence and the Preservation of Historic Documents

In recent decades, digitization has been presented as an important strategy both for the preservation of historic documents and for giving increased access for researchers to such materials. In the Norwegian context, this has not only implied the digitization of printed matter but also the digitization of audiovisual material like photography and analog tape recordings. From a technical perspective, there are of cause difficulties in digitizing such a variety of material when considering the diversity of media formats dating back to the nineteenth century. However, from the archival community criticism has been raised not only about the quality of the work but also the concerning the selection process, the organization of the material, and the collection of metadata. The National Library of Norway, especially, has attempted to avoid the problem of selection by attempting to digitize all of visual, sonic and audio-visual culture heritage. But this has created even greater challenges for the organization and registration of metadata. This is an issue that is apparent to the National Library, so it is looking into the possibility of using artificial intelligence – learning algorithms – to organize the material. The key issue is that the preservation of historic material is also dependent on the preservation of context and on metadata enabling us to interpret and understand the material at hand

Artificial Intelligence and the Preservation of Historic Documents

In recent decades, digitization has been presented as an important strategy both for the preservation of historic documents and for giving increased access for researchers to such materials. In the Norwegian context, this has not only implied the digitization of printed matter but also the digitization of audiovisual material like photography and analog tape recordings. From a technical perspective, there are of cause difficulties in digitizing such a variety of material when considering the diversity of media formats dating back to the nineteenth century. However, from the archival community criticism has been raised not only about the quality of the work but also the concerning the selection process, the organization of the material, and the collection of metadata. The National Library of Norway, especially, has attempted to avoid the problem of selection by attempting to digitize all of visual, sonic and audio-visual culture heritage. But this has created even greater challenges for the organization and registration of metadata. This is an issue that is apparent to the National Library, so it is looking into the possibility of using artificial intelligence – learning algorithms – to organize the material. The key issue is that the preservation of historic material is also dependent on the preservation of context and on metadata enabling us to interpret and understand the material at hand

Editorial

Archives are sites of exploration and discovery for all kinds of practices. They are also reinforced structures. Whether as a library of manuscripts, museum store or personal collection, the ‘archive-as-repository’ catalogues and categorizes, houses and buries, its items. Bringing the contents of an archive to life requires that one ignite what is dormant so as to draw archival materials out into the space of the world to be received and experienced in new ways. Designed to stimulate collaborative conversations and exchanges, in and around the archive, with a view to presenting new approaches to archival experiences, and with them, styles of writing that resonate with the ‘archival’ as a concept and as a practice, this guest-edited issue expands the field of the archive to incorporate a variety of different practitioner perspectives. Whether through animation, art education, contemporary art, costume, creative writing, information retrieval studies, performance, sculpture, sound and textiles, re-writing the archive from these positions can inform how historical and material remnants of the past may be re-thought in creative practice

Privacy, Restriction, and Access: Legal and Ethical Dilemmas

This paper examines the intersection of privacy and access in archival repositories. Archival repositories are well known for containing restricted material, and for protecting the privacy of the donors. This literature review examines the need for restricted material from both legal and ethical standpoints, as well as discussing culturally sensitive materials while determining what archives and libraries can do to protect both themselves and their donors while enhancing accessibility and freedom of information