Policy, metadata archival/rkkg piece of
It may be that it addresses all/several areas simultaneously
Common themes cutting swaths across
A lot of diff areas of engagement and how we may contribute
Other kinds of questions in the info field, too
Able to articulate the big challenges and source them back to who’s saying it
A set of rsch questions that would doable, measurable, incremental
Turkish records – French recordkeeping practices
Aztec/Spanish –
Interesting to look at intersection and what happens over time
McKemmish – co-creatorship; Acland, Ward, Reed (in Australia, funded through academic-professional partnership)
1996
Describing records in context in the continuum: the Australian Rkkg Metadata Schema
RKMS
Business in this case is transactionality
Where does the archiving world end? Duranti, looking at organizational
Records continuum model, replace business with activity – takes in all that scope
In continuum world view, it’s a global worldview
Of course the ppl who put it together, come from a background
Very broad scope, but instantiations come down very narrowly/specifically
Entity-relationship model used in description. This was the first. Now ER model being appied to intl standards for archival description as well. Powerful way of relating the biggest things record, people, theory, processes
Showed the many kinds of relationship bt the major areas of the preoccupation, not just the document
They did a lot of mapping vs existing metadata sets
Looking if every metadata element is mapped is a test of validity
Test of validity
Other readings are the implementations of this
Their definition of metadata is broad
Metadata has become a term like information
It’s everywhere
Parallel dimension of metadata. It’s everywhere, and takes on everypossible shape
SPIRT
Most of work until this was record-centric/passive records
They come up with idea of active records
Dynamics that need ever-broader and richer
Records have agency and contingency
Any record looked at at any moment by diff ppl is different
They have consequences, too. They can make things happen.
Records continuum thinking
Standards relating to what they do, then the differentiate:
Records of continuing value (archives)
Records of business/everything à records of continuing value are archives
Metadata can happen when records are created and when put in archive, and post-custodial
Project has promised 6 things: Semantic Web included
All standardized documentation created in the context of business and social activity – only standardized! Problematic
RDF, Semantic Web
Circular reasoning – feature of deductive modeling
Metadata is standardized – Australia -- they are known for leading in the standards area, so they are saying metadata is standardized
Layers of standards designed to interact with each other. Requires standards at every layer
Spent a lot of time in the 90s establishing laws, policies, standards
Notion of interoperability comes into play
In the end you’re talking abt an info world where manual processing is unsustainable—need to have standards to do this. But when you look at local systems, it breaks down.
Power struggle – depends on how inclusive you want to be. Do you are that it doesn’t work in some places?
Change mgmt. ppl are invested in their organic methods and then something is imposed
Making of standards is a huge point of power
Negotiation dealing with conflicts of interest of different stakeholders
Like I talked about how this usually becomes a hybrid
What value does the choice has
After a standard is set, is there still a negotiation? I think so, but Xiaomi doesn’t
To me, it’s an implementation issue.
Interesting negotiation bt cultures in making the standards
Implemented in various degrees of rigor
Another negotiation in local issues
Clever rkkg project, no matter how much standardized, haven’t enough
Standards worl =d full of negotiations
Th eppl who develop standards are usually the most powerful, but not always (ie software, if they have market share, they can simply not adhere to intl standards
Assumption of the authors
Identify categorize label the metadata that supports thru time and space no matter where and when (I think this is crazy)
M.T. need a dynamic method of dealing with different metadata environments
Very much like ii
Diff bt archival description and metadata – big fight over that
1999:
new tech – continuum thinking is when metadata becomes useful
metadata is more than archival description
includes archival description
anne: data abt records
them: data about data
archival descry is a value-added TKTK that is created subsequent to the record
duranti – only a human can do that meaning making
some value-added, some naturally occurring
generates a trace of the processing
MT some description happens at time of record creation
Their descriptive system entity-relationship-based model
Separate it our a description of history of admin materials to the materials themselves. 1960s manually, now automated
ERM establishes context – what is the process that was embedded
Everything that’s not the record itself in the context
Fonds to differentiate from other places ??
Relating this work to other research projects
Models
the way they’ve done this translates to diplomatics contexts in terms of juridical, TKTK, provenancial, (historical—not captured here)
authentic records of social and org activities. Mandates and warrant overlap
literary warrant – what are the ext and internal reqs for doing sthg in a particular way – diff from cataloging
archival tends to come top down, catalog tends to be bottom up
MT: what is the intersection bt decision making theory and how metadata systems are designed? Is dm analysis considered in the design?
The record doesn’t necessarily reflect the decision making process
Can you use standardized metadata to deal with future use of the records?
then, entity switch—it can apply at any specified level of aggregation, from indiv transaction to the societal purpose it serves
sthg set high up can be inherited through layers down
multiple views of metadata
taxonomy of relationships bt entity types
MT: so what happens when new types of entities emerge
Description as they move thru time, interpretation changes as events unfold, no implementation plan, though
Gives a model of continuous redescription – some say social media is a method to redescribe over time
RDF and object role modeling
Set up the work they’re doing within the RDF context, RDF compliant
RKMS conceived as implementation neutral
Persistently associated with a data object
all sorts of research abt how to do that. Does the metadata sit inside or outside the document
if a record is validated by its own metadata, need to be able to access the metadata at the time it was created
madras method to preserve access to original metadata?
Small corpus of ppl who work in this areas, tend to work on clusters of projects together
Standardized relationships
Lots of unstandardized metadata
Oral: ritual becomes metadata
These authors are very standards-driven vs local traditions
Tight or loose standards
Bottom up vs top down
Local conventions vs industry best practices
You have a routine process that generates predictable kinds of metadata to you, but when you’re no longer around to explain, that system may break down (TKTK)
Is this type of modeling considered a research method?
Systems analysis in context of business decomposing a biz process into components
Can this be validated? It’s a division of the world into categories
How do you compare to the systems development method?
First, conceptual development, then diff ways of modeling
Big prob in archival world is figuring out entities and properties (diplomatics) to begin modeling for metadata schema
The bases are no longer tangible, trying to understand how they manifest
Then can design scheme to exploit
This is conceptual modeling
Can’t use empirical instantian to test it
They’ve done the same as ppl in diplomatics world
Cannot do systems design work without defining basic constructs of your work
MT this conceptual work has to come first
Have to test the underlying assumptions
The second we try to get our world to interact with different social, cultural , political structure, “universal” presumptions no longer work
All standards are suboptimal bc they have to be negotiated
MT is there a tension bt believing to have best standards within one area rather than suboptimal global standards?
Xiaomi: Can’t test but can have case study to validate values you’ve hypotethesized
Morgan – Evans coming up with a way to ascribe value to how useful a standard is
Now this framework is being integrated with the international standards
RDF and semantic web – huge!!!!
Ferber, Mark, EAD is going that way now
Evans 1
MADRAS set up to analyze registry/relationships bt metadata systems
Conceptual first, then test t in various schemes
Hybrid bt life cycle and records continuum
Morgan: Short cycles of experimentation can be problematic
Anne: Form of tool development; operationalizing concepts, we make choices of what to include. When you build the system, it has to work
Reference software system – initial standard by which
Research question: e-records, which metadata standards should we implement, multiple? How do they talk to each other, no implementation nor standard is perfect this is a system to help you walk through those decisions
Moving images – 5 or 6 diffent way to describe material using description
Those decisions make a difference
Refer to timeline of different description and metadata schemes
Timeline shows dates of first releases
Cumulation
Th tool is designed to address particular domains
Evans 2
Situated within e-records
MT: Forward-looking vs retrospective description as a concept for my paper?
MT: the approach bt theory and practice – user versus power/mgmt.
Findings are in Anne’s handout
Still semantic imprecision that made it difficult to implement
Should use more metadata, not less – find ways to capture or create metadata automatically
Clever project experimental
OAIS model structure on which many archival systems are based
Data that’s ingested on the lefdt, goes into a black box with a lot of stuff happening, on the right is where consumer comes along and submits a query
Vision is that the system should be able to parse the query are parse the metadata to customize the output to the user
This may be what ii was missing. You need addtl metadata that then can be parsed out
Associations individual objects and their relationships. Link become metadata
Anne’s papers
Have always used stuff abt the stuff to make decisions
Archivists create massive amts of info
Tied up with notion of trust and evidence – audit trail
To trust the records, have to follow their records trail
Metadata doesn’t have to be digital – always been around
Ebla – earliest forms of tangible records, with no surviving indexes, rkkg practices
One can still see that there are traces associated with those records, heuristics associated with them
Metadata can be manual or automated
In digital world, can be either
Can bring the human intellect to bear
Resource-intensive
Archival description extensively resource-intensive
Metadata also accrues just by processing sthg through a system
Every time an event happends in a digital system, in creates a trace ß what we’re interested in
InterPARES models in the handout based on OAIS model
OAIS developed by the space-data community
IDEF 0: inputs go in from the left-hand side, outputs on right, top contstraints, bottom resources needed
In theory this is a model abt managing records, but only 3-4 of the inputs and outputs are the records, everything else is about the records – that’s the metadata
VERY interesting
A0 is highest level
A2 is inside the box, decomposed into 3 diff activities. Metadata activities in
Decomposes as you go on
Arrows an awful lot of this is metadata
Every action creates metadata
Indexing versus catalogin…more metadata than data
MT: what can you draw from the metadata??
YES
Not about the translation, but the metadata tells you about how the record is considered/characterized at certain points in time.
Can then look at how the metadata has transformed over time and space!
What
Who
Where
Why
How
They tried to figure out using activity models to see the flow of metadata
Literary warrant analysis to see why
Agents, who, specifications, how
MT: how forward-looking are archivists versus other developers?
Specify where these ?? are in an infinitely recursive process
How much metadata do you need to prove the trustworthiness of a record. Could it be summarized and some moved out of the system? Authorized abstracts (Roman) could we reappraise the metadata and cycle it out of the system or could new md synthesize
Need recordkeeping for the metadata for the rkkg system of the metadata, and on, and on
This work is still not done
**area for concentration for me?
Problematizing metadata is an info society problem!!!
One of biggest problems for research is the sustainability. Once research is done, no one to take it up
Anne’s interest in this research and how it has changed over time
Small # of ppl who work in metadata
LIS ppl focus on the bibliographic side
Anne, McKemmish, Evans are really the only ppl who walk both sides
She’s been doing it since she was a masters student
Surfacing, understanding, exploiting role of metadata in digital and manual environments
Trained in info design and info retrieval and not an historian, so she uses many different methods
Attracted to the field bc of the latency of what’s not said in the recors and
Needed delination of the things taken for granted in the archival field
MARC AMC format when she finished her masters
Shoehorned archival description into this format
She put togehre a volume of trends for major developers
Editor was Lancaster
Dissertation was a system design project
Metadata around email in academic environment and org structures that sat underneath the system
At time of huge email lawsuit. Judgment all came down to metadata, White House, Iran Contra, judge said the email was records, if paper and email, the record is the email, not the paper. Bc has metadata that tells who know what when***
Validation of the value of email
The moment she got here they started to develop EAD at Berkeley. She was on the development team
Then developed the onine archive of California – biggest archival collection anywhere
Conversion of finding aids into the digital wrld
MOAC eval whether EAD could describe museum colllections
At same time, she got involved with InterPARES (directed all of the descriptive work; $2million of funding; designed to feed back into ISO 28301?) and RKMS and co-PI on the Clever Project (only American professional involved)
Literary warrant analysis and modeling
Until 2006 she large shift personally
Increasingly concerned about disconnect bt the kinds of metadata schemes being developed and standardized from the reality on the ground
She brought up First course in community archives
Social justice
Whether archives were using metadata as a form of control
increasingly standardized so other environments couldn’t participate. Different epistemologies at work in those communities
Notion of standardized metadata
If you could identify conceptually, could you design a standardization at a conceptual level rather than prescriptive/formalized standards
If they participate in the standards world, neo-colonial problem
Can behave locally and participate globally
Could we map bt these concepts?
Developing a conceptual metadata structure
Working on that right now
Led her to metadata archaeloology project
What made her uneasy: assertions abt the fact that things have always been this way – inevitable ways that people create and manage records, these assumptions wrong there are different things in different place and at different times. In fashion, goes out of faction (cosmological approach in spain in 18th century but it was of its time)
Records continuum again a universal model, the more grassroots community work, we know doesn’t account for emotion, affect, other powerful things
Way to look at some of those things. Whether there are universals at work, are there oth’er factors not classicly considered?
Metadata as an apparatus – everythin gthat is in dialogue with the records and manifests in lots of waya
If you can identify those TKTK, and read them, you can see more bout the stuff behind the records
Used methods that
- Some of this required doing a lot of archival research to look at documentation that survived
- Interviews
- Ethnography
She was interested in the space n which records being kept and the discourse about the relationship
She was an outsider in the environments. She had to account for her own presence in the environment – ethical exigency. She has to account for herself and the effect of her being there on the environment. Began doing auto-ethnography
Intellectual, emotional, personal background reactions
Co-creation paper she gave at a conference on ethics of info
She sent an abstract. A woman was doing similar work re native American activities using a native American ontology
She said she had no choice but to use auto-ethnography
Our field looks nervously on autoethnography, but to do some of this kind of work, there’s not other way to account for those aspects, particularly when you’re an outsider. Need to account for you change epistemologically through the process, as well
She could look at separate cases on their own terms
How metadata discourses manifested
Small and big cases—warying granularity
A lot of depth abt the nuances
Really abt sensitizing ppl t the presence of metadata and the TKTK of metadata in an environment
So much in our field is about the agency of archive and effects of control
Metadata archaeology paper was pushing things to the extrme, lays out the method
Writing abook now abt method and several case studies
“Telling stories abt stories”
one is ATSIDA discussion that brings in metadata origina of all of that
bringing them home report – application and implication of rkkg and metadata
reparations can’t happen without them, either
how narratives then translate into the American context
social justice aspect – how do you honor the perspectives, needs, roles of underrepresented communities
catalogin community doesn’t buy in
social justice and empowerment – all of these metadata structures need a different premise that’s not just abt majority consensus – instead a pluralized perspective, as info mgmt. affect culture?
Adoption of the Dutch Manual in 1910 and its effect on archival practice globally
Laid out a set of heuristics, not codified in all systems of archival in the world. All came from one moment
Why did this happen. Did they understand the political agenda why did ppl coalesce around other ideas, why happen again around the internet? Why does that come up perennially? What does it mean for local and national practice?
Not everything is universal
Sharon trawig – development of high energy physics iarchive in japan partly here, only major science archival method outside the English-speaking world
Project in southern india to digitize French colonial newspaper, even though French and Indians don’t want to remember that industry
Arcadia foundation funds rescue of the archive
American institution funded by british agency to rescue and desrcribe records the French and indian has abandoned
Indians didn’t have access to the digital archive
What does all of that mean?
British required EAD used to describe the materials, but didn’t fit well
Diff Languages but descry in English
Available in three sites in us—what does that mean? Whose work are you sustaining
If archives are the province of the elite, have we just handed it back?
ALSIDA indig ontology and TKTK
Case study of the transgender living archive they are developing
Seeking to juxtapose the community-centric archive with the way they’ve been described in the official record (mostly medical records)
Africa Uganda – hoping to repatriate ethnomusicological TKTK
Digital repatriation project back to these villages, which don’t have the infrastructure, so developing an archive for them – transnational and local issues
Cesar chavez center—building an archive that will be centered around the workers mvnt
Moves things a long way from the readings today
Exploring the implications of metadata discourse in these environments
Related to agenda of pluralizing the archival environment
None of these environments exist independently
Interdependencies
MT: interdependency correlates to interoperability?
How empower groups to interact not violate rights, etc
