Contemplating Co-creator Rights in Archival Description

1. Introduction

Records and other archival materials such as research data are more likely to be conceived of and thus described as bureaucratic instruments and primary sources for scholarly use, than in terms of the central and instrumental role they can play in the lives, needs and emotions of individuals, families and communities to whom they pertain. Much of the capacity of these materials to effect and record actions, and to inspire affect is integrally bound up with the metadata associated with them (i.e., all or any of the various traces, statements and surrogates that are made by or about the materials and their various structures and contexts over time, including archival description).  However, the metadata generated by creators of these materials and the descriptive practices subsequently employed by government, academic and other mainstream archival repositories that preserve them rarely directly or adequately address the concerns and needs of other such parties within the relevant community of records.

 

The emergent archival concept of co-creatorship addresses concerns of equity and ethics in contemporary archival description and metadata more broadly, but at the same time challenges traditional ideas about provenance, which is the primary principle applied in archival arrangement and description. Drawing upon a study of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive (ATSIDA), a digital archive that is structured and maintained according to a set of protocols developed in consultation with Indigenous community representatives, this paper contemplates a range of metadata concerns relating to co-creators (i.e., those who were involved with the creation of the record as contributors, subjects, victims, or legatees rather than as officially-acknowledged authors). It also discusses the role that community protocols might play in promoting under-represented community needs, interests and beliefs in archival description, and raises the question of how archival description might cope with a plurality of such communities needing additional representation.

 

2.0. Theoretical Framing

2.1. Archival Discourse

Recent critical discourse in archival studies has been trained on issues of representation, equity and ethical imperatives associated with the concept, societal role and practices of the archive. Three distinct strands have focused on the implications of power and representation for historically subjugated, marginalized, or subaltern communities: post-colonial analyses of the role of the archive and archival practices in colonialism (e.g., Stoler 2009; Ghosh 2005), the community archives movement (e.g., Flinn et al. 2009), and the movement to promote Indigenous protocols for archival materials (e.g., Nakata et al. 2006; McKemmish et al. 2011b).  Each strand is deeply cognizant of the often difficult and intertwined histories that are inevitably reflected in the equally intertwined archival materials that are their residue.  At the same time, each strand raises its own questions about how mainstream archival description reflects and shapes interpretations of these materials in favor of dominant or élite interests, and often in the process subordinates or excludes the narratives, needs and perspectives of communities who were under-empowered, unwitting, or unwilling participants in the creation of documentation about them.

 

Institutional consultation or partnerships with these communities and community self-determination over their own materials have been proposed in these discourses as two ways to acknowledge and include marginalized and excluded voices.  Archival description that directly addresses community needs and perspectives, however, must go beyond enhancing access for these communities to collections and items held by individual repositories. It must also be able to traverse, explain, “set the record straight” (McKemmish et al. 2011a), and reconcile several kinds of metadata for multiple kinds of materials by and about those communities that today might be dispersed across many locations and repositories, and have been created over time under different political and social circumstances and according to different worldviews.

 

2.2. Co-creatorship, Communities of Record, and the Archival Multiverse

There are several goals of archival descriptive standards and best practices. These include to elucidate the circumstances of creation and creative intent behind the materials being described, to expose their documentary inter-relationships (sometimes referred to as their archival bond), to support user assessment of their reliability and continued authenticity, and to promote findability. There are many complexities inherent in describing archival evidence and information in ways that can cope with variant worldviews and shifting terminology, conceptualizations and ascribed meaning and value that might occur over the lifetime of the preserved materials. Moreover, professional best practices have yet to grapple significantly with such ethical and human rights considerations as integrating community protocols, undertaking community-centric re-description, or “reconciling” legacy metadata.

 

Provenance, the primary organizing principle underlying physical and intellectual access to archival materials paradigmatically recognizes only the author (juridical or human), collector, or donor as the possible creators of archival materials.  The act of designating provenance is an acknowledgment of the authority and responsibility and, by implication, reinforces the power status of, the creating entity.  Other parties involved in the creation of the materials, if mentioned at all, are treated as subjects or objects of those materials and may not necessarily even be acknowledged through additional descriptive access points such as added entries. Expanded conceptualizations of provenance have been proposed to address records or other materials of archival value generated by digital collaborations or collectively by communities. They include functional provenance (Bantin 1996), ethnicity as provenance (Wurl 2005), and Hurley’s simultaneous multiple provenance and parallel provenance (2005, (1) and (2)).

 

One emergent approach, that integrates Hurley’s ideas with rights assertions regarding Indigenous knowledge that are contained in the 2007 U.N. Declaration on Indigenous Rights, is to recognize other parties to the creation of the records as co-creators who have rights in those records. Among these are the right to be acknowledged as a co-creator, and to ensure, through self-determination or consultation, that archival description reflects their perspectives, experiences, expressions, and ways of knowing. Co-creatorship and the associated matrix of rights and obligations is one of a cluster of conceptually-related constructs emerging from recent archival theory-building and applied research that have implications for archival description and the expansion of the conceptualization of provenance: a community of records acknowledges the web of relationships between actions, records and recordkeeping traditions, practices and conventions within one particular community of memory (Bastian 2003, 5); the collective identity of a community of memory is linked to a community recognizing itself “through its memory of a common past … [and] involves an embeddedness in its past and, consequently, in the memory texts [in any form …] through which that past is mediated” (Ketelaar 2005, 44); and  archival reconciliation is an approach developed through Indigenous community research partnerships in Australia that involves “acknowledgement of the impact of past and existing recordkeeping and archival structures and practices; and situating current and future structures and practices within the Archival Multiverse [emphasis added]” (Gilliland et al. forthcoming), the latter encompassing “the plurality of evidentiary texts (records in multiple forms and cultural contexts), memory-keeping practices and institutions, bureaucratic and personal motivations, community perspectives and needs, and cultural and legal constructs” (Pluralizing the Archival Curriculum Group 2011).

 

2.3. The Metadata Archaeology Project

The Metadata Archaeology Project, conducted by the author between 2010 and 2012, used discourse analysis, ethnography and autoethnography to examine metadata considerations in various archival contexts where aspects of the above discursive strands could be observed in action, and to explore issues of incommensurability and intersectionality that might arise. (Gilliland 2011). The result was a series of deep descriptive studies that included (ATSIDA) in Australia.

 

3.0. Discursive Context for ATSIDA

3.1. A Protocols-based Approach to Archival Work

In 1995, the Australian Library and Information Association published the first edition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resources Network (ATSILIRN) Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services. A key philosophy underlying the ATSILIRN Protocols is a “both ways” or “two ways” approach that is based upon “equal respect for both Indigenous and ‘western’ languages, knowledge and learning approaches” (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resources Network 2005).   The ATSILIRN Protocols recognize the moral rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the owners of their knowledge and the importance of their involvement in deciding issues arising from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content and perspectives in documentary materials, media and traditional cultural property.  They also encourage Indigenous participation in the governance and operation of libraries, archives and information services.  The ATSILIRN Protocols influenced the development of similar protocols addressing Native American concerns about archives and archival practices in the United States (First Archivist Circle 2007).  They also influenced the philosophy, structure and activities of ATSIDA.

 

As the ATSILIRN Protocols point out, among the many perspectives present in Australian library and archival materials relating to the Indigenous population are “those of the colonist, policeman and magistrate as well as those of the historian, anthropologist and social commentator.” The perspectives that are notably absent, however, are those of Indigenous people themselves.

 

3.2. Bringing Them Home

Bringing Them Home (BTH), the 1997 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, highlighted the historical roles that bureaucratic recordkeeping and metadata played in the identification, forcible removal from their families and communities, and assimilation of Australian Indigenous children between 1869 and the 1970s (Australian Human Rights Commission 1997). Records from this period routinely applied the official bureaucratic terminology of those carrying out the programs and activities associated with the removals and used English names and designations to refer to Indigenous country, locations, communities and individuals.  Both bureaucratic records and materials gathered or created by anthropologists, naturalists, and private collectors from or about Indigenous communities or individuals during this time could include intimate and often derogatory information about Indigenous people; or record language, stories, songs and other elements that were considered secret or sacred by Indigenous people.  While the structures, categorizations and language used in describing these records and other materials are evidence of colonial, bureaucratic and scholarly attitudes and activities of the time, they remain far from benign in terms of both their historical and continuing effect and the affect on Indigenous individuals, families and communities.

 

The BTH report also focused on the ways in which archives today might support redress to those who had been removed and the inclusion of their lives, experiences and voices within the national memory.  It pointed out that Indigenous family history research using what bureaucratic records remain in existence is key to certifying descent from the Indigenous peoples of Australia and acceptance as Indigenous by the Indigenous community.  However, the report identified several barriers to using these records for such purposes.  For example, they were not easy to use in the ways that Indigenous community members needed to use them because records were described according to provenance (i.e., the agency, program or individual responsible) and there was no consolidated name index.  Moreover, references to individuals, often idiosyncratically spelled, or ambiguously or unclearly designated, were scattered through the surviving records of many different agencies, including government offices, schools, and healthcare providers.

 

The report called for description of these materials in ways that would assist Indigenous persons in their quests while protecting their privacy and guarding against any future compilation of dossiers about them.  In effect, it was asking not only for more complete representation of a past that was inadequately captured in official records, but also for something new and ethically, theoretically and practically challenging for those holding records – the creation of alternate descriptions that directly addressed Indigenous community worldviews, concerns and needs.  ATSIDA represents one of several archival initiatives that have addressed the report’s concerns.

 

3.3. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive (ATSIDA)

ATSIDA is a multi-site data archive hosted by a network of Australian universities that is also a digital “keeping place” for materials of a diversity of provenances relating to Australian Indigenous people.  Initiated in 2010, and including both Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff, its content includes extracts of official records such as Indigenous censuses and police reports, as well as opinion polls and surveys; and digital versions of genealogies, stories, songs, oral histories, and other expressions of Indigenous knowledge, memory, and ritual. It is exemplary not only because of its data archive approach, but also because its ethos derives from a set of protocols that were developed in association with a Reference Group composed of senior Indigenous Australian academics and researchers on Indigenous issues (ATSIDA  2010).  Community consultation, the building of mutual trust, negotiating and reconciling various rights and interests, and professional commitment to these processes thus lie at the heart of ATSIDA.

 

While such relationship-building can be drawn-out, highly charged and messy, the need can be intensely urgent because of the very real effect and affect of the materials held by ATSIDA on the lives, identities and welfare of living Indigenous individuals, families and communities. As the BTH Report documented, records and their metadata have historically participated in systematically perpetrating the destruction of identity, memory, and lives of individuals and entire communities.  The work of ATSIDA illustrates the ways in which the same records with alternate, culturally and situationally-appropriate metadata, including community-supplied annotations (increasingly via social media), when managed in accordance with Indigenous needs, concerns, and beliefs, and with professional awareness of the urgency that is often involved, can support redress for that violence and the reconstruction of identity, memory, and lives.

 

There are outstanding issues to tackle, however.  For example, archival description, typically created at one specific moment, must be capable of evolving as circumstances shift.  One illustration that was provided during the ATSIDA study related to the description of sacred or secret materials.  The identification and classification of materials as sacred or secret tend to be contingent on other factors within the community and thus may be subject to change.  For example, ceremonies no longer being practiced because they have been lost or forgotten might be closed, but might be opened if the community were able to recover the ceremony by re-learning it from archival materials such as recordings and photographs of non-Indigenous provenance or from other documentation that might yet be uncovered.

 

Another issue raised during the study was the risks and questions associated with metadata creation at increasingly granular levels, as well as with its promulgation online.  For example, what are the specific benefits of granular description to Indigenous individuals and communities, and what might be the dangers? To what extent are archivists creating a new record or information resource about Indigenous people through their descriptive processes? What kinds of coordination might need to be in place or new descriptive techniques devised to address privacy and other concerns of Indigenous and other vulnerable communities while also facilitating as much access as possible by audiences with different needs?

 

4. Conclusions and Areas for Further Research

Simultaneously representing the interests and perspectives of multiple creator communities equitably, respectfully and systematically is complex, even in the case of ATSIDA, which has two primary audiences: Indigenous communities and academic researchers. Each audience can have considerable internal diversity, being made up of multiple communities. Moreover, communities of all types are dynamic and may be non-exclusive – they may share some characteristics and perspectives, but not others, and their composition, nature and needs continuously evolve.  Description that is responsive to the needs, epistemologies and practices of communities through working agreements such as protocols, is going to have to be nimble enough to address such diversity and dynamism.

 

In the United States, members of the archival profession have expressed concerns that endorsing a protocols-based approach will open the door for non-Indigenous communities and groups that have suffered historical injustices and inequities to seek input in the management of records relating to them, including, among other measures, the creation of community-specific metadata. There is also concern that endorsement of the Native American Protocols would privilege one group of peoples over all others; that the pasts and legacies of the different Indigenous, migrant, immigrant and slave populations in the United States are too intertwined to address separately; and that if each group or community needed to be addressed through similar protocols, archives with holdings relating to multiple communities might see their descriptive systems descend into chaos.

 

These concerns highlight the importance of further research and development in this area.  If indeed the archival profession were to act more proactively to address social justice issues, should it address the needs and exigencies of each of these communities individually using a protocols-based approach, should it be done on an institution-by-institution and case-by-case basis, or should the entire archival paradigm be re-examined to identify more holistic and systematic ways in which it could be more supportive of the different co-creators, and communities of records and memory that make up the archival multiverse?

 

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge Alex Byrne, Elizabeth Mulhollan, Martin Nakata, Matt Poll, Kirsten Thorpe for their assistance with ATSIDA study, and pay her respects to Indigenous Elders and peoples past and present.

 

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