1. Julia Noordegraaf (NL)
"Participatory Archiving: A Dialogue with the Audience"
Digitization provides unique opportunities for engaging audiences with audiovisual heritage. In digital form, films, broadcasting materials and media artworks potentially come within reach of everyone with a computer and internet connection. Discussing a number of recent examples in participatory archiving, this lecture focuses on the potential of involving ‘the crowd’ in various aspects of the archival process, as well as the conditions for its success. Users can be involved in processes of selection and acquisition, by both indicating preferences for certain types of content and adding their own. It raises the question of how this involvement of ‘amateur-curators’ matches with the expert knowledge of the professional? Besides, online communities could be involved in preserving complex, interactive media productions or niche productions that can otherwise not be preserved, such as software-based artworks or obscure film genres. There, the challenge is to balance the standards and ethics of professional conservation against the motivation and self-designed practices of amateurs. Finally, archives may collaborate with various user-groups in increasing the scope and effectiveness of reuse, from crowdsourcing projects for description to improve the metadata to involving potential users in the design and development of access platforms. A successful collaboration with ‘the crowd’ requires a shift in thinking: from guardians of expert knowledge archivists should see themselves as editors that manage information streams that extend beyond the walls of the institution into the open realm of the digital domain. This involves opening up the archive, trusting the crowd to be able to provide valuable knowledge, inviting in artists, filmmakers and other media producers that can provide new perspectives on your collections and a readiness to loose control over what users do with your collections – in short, a perspective on participation as dialogue.
2. Johan Oomen (NL)
"THE MANY UNEXPECTED JOYS OF BEING "OUT THERE”: examples of user participation in the heritage domain"
The web is increasingly social. New platforms create openings for social, cultural, economic legal and political change. This has an enormous impact on present day society. On the web, users are active creators, creating and sharing for instance stories, photographs and videos.
The mass digitisation of analogue holdings creates the potential for GLAMs to become an integral part of the web. In the case of fragile media (such as magnetic tapes and chemical film) digitisation is a means to ensure long-term preservation of the information. Digitisation is also a precondition for creating new access routes to collections. Once published on the web, collections become an integral part of the so-called Giant Global Graph by adding metadata to information objects such as web pages and images to enable links, and creating the relationships that conceptually or semantically link the information objects to each other.
Through publication and linking online, attention can be brought to even the most obscure artefacts. One of the unique properties of archival collections is their richness in the breadth and variety of objects and topics they cover, and the quality of contextual data about them. The web provides the opportunity for this richness to surface and to satisfy needs not only based on popularity, but also based on ad hoc interests. In an online context where sharing is the norm, it becomes almost a necessity for memory organisations to make their collections available online in order to retain and support community interest. In effect, GLAMs and their audiences are now also part of what Abraham Bernstein et al. call the ‘global brain’, the intelligent network formed by users, together with the information and communication technologies that connect them. New services are being launched that explore opportunities this brings to organisations. One increasingly popular area is that of crowdsourcing. The crowdsourcing phenomenon can be defined as: ‘the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call’. One key attribute is that most crowdsourcing activities are small (micro-) tasks that can be carried out by large numbers of people. Crowdsourcing initiatives in the heritage domain today also aim to have long-lasting effects on the way institutions operate. For instance, users are being challenged to add tags to collections, help with transcribing historical texts, share contextual knowledge in collaborative wiki environments and so on. Crowdsourcing has a profound impact on the workflows of heritage institutions through identifying micro-tasks that can be outsourced to the crowd. These activities can be carried out by end-users remotely and can reduce operational costs. New forms of usage of collections (beyond access) can also lead to a deeper level of involvement with the collections. In this contribution, we look at two use cases of crowdsourcing in action: the Sound of the Netherlands and the Waisda? Video Labeling game.
3. Ponencia Magistral de Clausura: Jon Ippolito (USA)
"Unreliable Archivists"
This talk takes a step back from the debate over the authenticity of intent and material at the center of debates on preservation to examine communities that propagate cultural memes with a complete disregard for those norms. Remix may have recently exploded thanks to the Internet and easy access to digital editing tools, yet re-performance as a preservation strategy has a venerable pedigree in the songs, dances, and oral histories of indigenous cultures. What does this mean for archivists of the Internet age?
