I’ve noticed before that in all the excitement over Web2.0 tools for user participation, archivists tend to make one big assumption: that textual descriptions of archives will remain the primary access channel to archival material in the electronic age. This is despite all the evidence (when we bother to look for it, which isn’t really often enough) that users find archival finding aids difficult to navigate, and an ongoing blurring of boundaries between previously separate descriptive products (catalogues, indexes, calendars, transcripts etc.) in online contexts.
In the context of user participation, this assumption is particularly significant, since adding considerable quantities of user-contributed metadata – comments, tags, and word-for-word transcripts of documents – can surely only amplify the existing difficulties of user interface design and add to the complexities of using archival descriptive systems. And that’s not to mention the possibilities suggested by ongoing improvements in optical character recognition and data mining technologies. Even given the assistance of sophisticated search algorithms, that’s a hell of a lot of text for the poor researcher to have to wade through.
Then of course, many archivists – and many of our users – would subscribe to the view that there is something extra special about the touch and feel of original archive documents, and consider the digitised surrogate to be an inevitably impoverished medium because of it. Despite advances in digital tactility devices this one’s probably quite hard to crack for remote access to archives, however!
One really promising alternative is visual representation, which is particularly effective for very large datasets – see, for example, Mitchell Whitelaw’s ‘visual archive‘ research project for the National Archives of Australia.
And on Tuesday, I was introduced to another – searching by sound, soon to be implemented as one of the three access routes into the archive of the artist John Latham (it’ll be under the ‘AA’ link shortly; in the meantime you can browse a slideshow the archive or interrogate its contents in more traditional, textual fashion by clicking on either of the other two letter codes from the homepage). Fascinating stuff, although one potential problem is that you would need to know quite a substantial amount about John Latham and his ‘flat-time’ theories before you can make sense of the soundtrack and the finding aid itself – so in that sense, the sound search tool might be as much as barrier as a facilitator of access. But then again, the same can be said of certain textual finding aids: fonds, anybody?
Anyone fancy devising an olefactory finding aid?
Around the World in 80 Gigabytes 