Interview questionnaire about the selection criteria used by digital archives of historical newspapers

The questionnaire is related to 'Of global reach yet of situated contexts: an examination of the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape digital archives of historical newspapers', forthcoming in Archival Science.Abstract:A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to archives. These questions are increasingly being asked of digital archives, too. Here, we examine the complex interplay of institutional, intellectual, economic, technical, practical and social factors that have shaped decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of digitised newspapers in and from online archives. We do so by undertaking and analysing a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with public and private providers of major newspaper digitisation programmes. Our findings contribute to emerging understandings of factors that are rarely foregrounded or highlighted yet fundamentally shape the depth and scope of digital cultural heritage archives and thus the questions that can be asked of them, now and in the future. Moreover, we draw attention to providers’ emphasis on meeting the needs of their end-users and how this is shaping the form and function of digital archives. The end user is not often emphasised in the wider literature on archival studies and we thus draw attention to the potential merit of this vector in future studies of digital archives.</div

Dickens, Death, and Afterlives: Introduction

How do you commemorate the anniversary of an author’s death? What is and is not appropriate? While natal anniversaries are by nature upbeat, with greater scope for playful celebration, death anniversaries negotiate a need for reverence, reassessment, and an engaging cultural campaign. A 150th anniversary further has to contend with its status as a lessimpressive mid-point: not yet a bicentenary and still somehow less of a milestone than a centenary. In our introduction to this special issue on ‘Dickens, Death, and Afterlives’ we explore a range of responses to Charles Dickens’s sesquicentenary in 2020. Coming just eightyears after wide-ranging international celebrations for the bicentennial of Dickens’s birth, plans for Dickens150 were noticeably smaller in scale. While face-to-face activities have been understandably curtailed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ingenuity of the Dickens community has come to the fore in creating alternative opportunities to mark the anniversary. Within academia, the pandemic context combined with worldwide demonstrations for Black Lives Matter has given a new urgency to questions typically prompted by author anniversaries: how is Dickens relevant now? Why do we continue to readand study his works? What is his legacy 150 years on? It would be premature to proffer comprehensive answers at this stage, before the far-reaching impacts on arts organisations, cultural institutions, and universities can be assessed. Nonetheless, we note several emerging trends.In what follows, we provide a selective overview of anniversary celebrations for Dickens in 1970 and 2012, identifying themes and issues that continue to resonate in 2020, including who ‘owns’ Dickens, what it means to celebrate him ‘authentically’, and the importance of place. Thereafter, two case studies focalise these issues in a sesquicentenary context: the successful fundraising campaign to bring the ‘Lost Portrait’ by Margaret Gillies to the Dickens Museum in 2019 and a controversial line of luxury handbags advertised in late2019, which incorporate part of a genuine Dickens letter. Finally, we introduce the contributions made by this issue to an understanding of Dickens’s literary representation of death, Dickens’s own death, and Dickensian afterlives

WP7 scoping report on archiving and preserving OA monographs

Technical methods for effectively archiving complex digital research publications and for creating an integrated collections of content in different formats have not yet been developed. As part of COPIM, an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers, WP7 (Work Package 7) have begun by compiling a digital preservation risk register. This report builds on that work in offering an overview of existing preservation solutions for Open Access (OA) research monographs. It brings together interviews conducted with representatives from several university presses and OA presses, and draws on the discussions that took place in a workshop held in September 2020 with a range of professionals in the archiving and preservation domain. What the interviews and the workshop have indicated is the need for a consensus on file formats, further awareness and a culture shift to acknowledge and respond to the importance of digital preservation, further support and guidance for small and scholar-led publishers to assure equity in the publishing and preservation landscape, and a clear way forward regarding techniques to effectively preserve the components of complex digital monographs, including links and embedded content. A number of opportunities for future work have been highlighted, among them tools, guidance, developing new workflows, and nurturing a network of advocates in specific communities. These avenues for future work are further elaborated on at the end of this report.</p