Transcript No Slide Title

The Virtual Archive and National Memory:
Toward A Comparative Study of the Digital
Library Models in North American and
European Setting
Marija Dalbello
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
[email protected]
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~dalbello
________________________________________
European vs. American Context
•Centralization (European)
National infrastructure within government legislation;
Projects; top-down approach; involvement of governments
and ministries of culture, managing cultural heritage
•Dispersal and Consolidation within an accepted public
policy framework (American)
Transinstitutional and Cross-Institutional Partnerships; public
National Information Infrastructure (NII) (telecommunications
act of 1996); decentralized, competitive and cooperative;
grant-driven; bottom-up approach with minimum government
involvement; evolutionary growth and selection
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Theoretical Perspectives
•Theory of Cultural Production
digital library’s role as cultural agency; American institutions-the sites for the production, dissemination, and
appropriation of cultural capital
•Cultural Authority
Library and the social reproduction of culture (Raber 1998;
Harris vs. Shera)
•Memory Institutions and the Invention of Tradition
(Digital continuity, managing the record of the past)
identity shaped by memory institutions; retrospective
orientations in current digital library projects are sites for
building national identity and “invented” traditions (Fentress
& Wickham 1991; Confino 1997; Hobsbawm and Ranger
1983)
Model for the study of digital library as cultural agency
(aspects)
1
2
3
tex
t
audience
context
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Research Questions
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
Institutional Contexts and Funding Patterns
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
Techniques of Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging
Memory Narrative?
Organizing Metaphors, Spatial and Temporal Markers of
Identity
Developing A Study of Digital Library Projects
3
2
1
Institutionalizatio
n
(Who?)
narrative coherence (How?)
organizing metaphors
(What?)
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The Method: Content analysis
•ARL (Association of Research Libraries) Digital Initiatives
Database
Web-based registry for descriptions of digital initiatives (408
registered projects) (http://www.arl.org/did)
•Descriptions of federally funded cooperative projects
defined in the DLI (the Digital Libraries Initiative) Phase 1
and 2
•Virtual Library, ACM Special Interest Group on Information
Retrieval (SIGIR), and descriptions of projects of the
National Digital Library Federation
•Limitations of content analysis from existing sources
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Criteria for Selection of Digital Library
Projects for analysis:
•projects with "retrospective" orientation (i.e. deal with
cultural heritage)
•significant initiatives that have achieved some sort of
institutionalization and may be deemed to have or will have
a significant cultural impact
•projects in the public sector
•projects that may reflect a distinctly “American” approach
because they deal with cultural heritage, i.e. culture as
conceptualized in the context of a national policy
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
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Funding contexts (Saracevic & Dalbello 2001, in print):
•funding of governmental and non-governmental organizations
•funding of practical developments from similar sources
•funding from academic and public institutions
•funding for new implementations in their realm from professional and scientific
societies and subject-specific institutes
•funding from publishers to enter the new age of digital publications and access
•funding for putting their treasures in the digital domain from historical societies,
archives, and museums
•funding from collaborative contributions to provide for the common good in the
new Internet (the tradition of "free information")
•funding for knowledge organization systems in industrial settings
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
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Findings (institutional contexts)
•National type 1(digital library initiative phase 1 and 2)
•National type 2 (Library of Congress, The Making of
America)
•University (Special collections & Archives)
•Public libraries
•Society / subject specific Institutes
•Publishers
•Historical Societies / Archives / Museums
•Transinstitutional, Collaborative distributed digital archives
•Institutionally unattached
•Various combinations thereof
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
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Discussion
•Strong presence of frameworks defined by traditional
approaches to collection development in special collections
and archives (predetermines uses; obscurantism; static and
passive collections; digitization of materials, less
contextualization)
•Library of Congress - leadership and new approaches to
collection development in the digital environment
(contextualization, multimedia, collaborative efforts)
•From dispersal to consolidation
•Increasingly focus on collaborative efforts (1998+)
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
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Conclusions
•Limited number of players; consequently, dominant models
and those receiving most funding are not most innovative
•Major contexts (universities’ special collections & archives
provide least innovative approaches but build strong
presence in digital libraries)
•Increasing presence of public libraries
•Community memory projects
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
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Findings: modalities of narrative
presentation
•Topicality
•Biographical approach to organizing historical discourse
•Event-based approach
•Commemorative
•picaresque and episodic (non-narrative)
•Self-reflexivity
•Focus on local history
•Localization using physical metaphor
•Emphasis on invented traditions (the “famous firsts”)
•Glocal? (obscurity or diversity?)
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
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Discussion
•Simplicity of narrative presentation techniques
•Story is a picaresque voyage through linear displays
meandering around framed images of objects, figures, or
landscapes
•Contextualization via localization, uniqueness, diversity
•Social position of collections, objects, and narratives is
unclear
•Floating signifiers rather than signifiers eliciting coherent
readings
•But, texts with strong Performative aspects
•Are these collections building “restricted” codes or
contributing to “elaborate” ones? (cf. Basil Bernstein’s
distinction of “restricted”/”elaborate” code)
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
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Conclusions
•For all the emphasis on the retrospective content (the
historical) as noted feature of the digital library activities in
the communities of practice related to memory institutions
(archives, libraries, historical societies, museums, etc.), they
are weak in relating historical content
•Challenges: to make these discourses public and globally
accessible
•Take advantage of “performative” potential to build new
ways of including viewers
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging Memory
Narrative?
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Preliminary Findings
•Period best represented: 1860-1920
•Subject focus: revolutionary war, civil war, african-american
experience, local history; natural history; history of technological
inventions; architectural styles; musical forms; evolution of print
forms
•Originals: images, documents (published and unpublished),
sound recordings, artifacts
•Digital Formats: Primarily scanned images, but also formatted
electronic text, multimedia to lesser degree; bibliographic
information
•Delivery methods: web exhibit, limited use of databases served
on the web
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging
Memory Narrative?
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Discussion
•Contextualization techniques limited to integration with print
source for access to data agglomeration, or integration with
supporting reference collections
•Consolidation of genres and formats from multiple
collections is limited to the Library of Congress
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging
Memory Narrative?
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Conclusion
A recent evaluation of the National Digital Library Initiative at
the Library of Congress (2000), states that NDLI is an
impressive agglomeration of text and images but the
problem is in the delivery of narrative content. If digital
libraries springing up in various institutional contexts are as
yet unconnected masses of fragments of data and visual
information, they are obviously suffering from a lack of
purpose. As a matter of public accountability for these new
forms is to recognize whether they are accomplishing what
they proclaim.
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Future Research
•In areas of: text, audiences, and context
•Text: Expand study using the same research questions to
the “National” initiatives in Europe
•Audiences: Viewing process study audience responses;
study situated viewers, tap into interpretive strategies (how
determined by “protocols of viewing” and “horizons of
expectation”) rather than cognitive science approach
•Context: Interviews with policy makers; how do “national”
libraries’ initiatives relate to projects in the public and private
sector; identify funding nodes for european context