A Discussion of Audiovisual Archival Methods: Conversations with Institutions, Content Creators, Archival System Designers and Integrators

[Excerpt:] My survey of local, national, and international audiovisual archival methods highlighted the underlying cause of why archiving media for video has yet to be refined to an easily-compartmentalized process. Companies who acknowledge that archiving their media properly is a concern still see it as unglamorous and perhaps even unworthy of committing a significant-enough portion of their budgets toward a sufficient solution. Finding “a solution” begins to look like the life’s work of an artist rather than a “Point A to Point B” procedure. In my discussions with various representatives of content creators, archival system integrators, and institutional archivists, I hoped to discover success stories. In the end, I was shown just how complex the archiving process is, and how this inscrutability makes it virtually impossible to answer the question, “How much does a proper archive cost?

Research in the Archival Multiverse

Over the past 15 years, the field of archival studies around the world has experienced unprecedented growth within the academy and within the profession, and archival studies graduate education programs today have among the highest enrolments in any information field. During the same period, there has also been unparalleled expansion and innovation in the diversity of methods and theories being applied in archival scholarship. Global in scope, Research in the Archival Multiverse compiles critical and reflective essays across a wide range of emerging research areas and interests in archival studies; it aims to provide current and future archival academics with a text addressing possible methods and theoretical frameworks that have been and might be used in archival scholarship and research

Research in the Archival Multiverse

Over the past 15 years, the field of archival studies around the world has experienced unprecedented growth within the academy and within the profession, and archival studies graduate education programs today have among the highest enrolments in any information field. During the same period, there has also been unparalleled expansion and innovation in the diversity of methods and theories being applied in archival scholarship. Global in scope, Research in the Archival Multiverse compiles critical and reflective essays across a wide range of emerging research areas and interests in archival studies; it aims to provide current and future archival academics with a text addressing possible methods and theoretical frameworks that have been and might be used in archival scholarship and research

Information journeys in digital archives

Archival collections have particular properties that make physical and intellectual access difficult for researchers. This generates feelings of uncertainty in the researchers leading to a large burden of enquiries to the archive, many routine. In this thesis I investigate the information seeking behaviours of archival researchers and the distinct properties of the archive first through the respective literatures and then through a series of five studies. Using systems, data and researchers from the National Archives, these studies examine the nature of the enquiries archives receive across many channels, the in-person interactions between archivists and researchers in the reading rooms and the unmediated search behaviours of archival researchers. I proceed to outline the barriers inhibiting research progress and the techniques or 'regulators' used by researchers to surmount or mitigate these barriers. In the final two studies I develop and attempt to validate an instrument for measuring uncertainty in information seeking in large digital collections. This three factor (disorientation, prospect and preparedness) scale of archival uncertainty allows improvements to online archival systems to be effectively tested before implementation. I also propose system properties which seem likely to assist researchers to make progress given these factors and which could be tested using this instrument