It has been graciously pointed out that my last post regarding the Grateful Dead collection at UCSC may have been barking up the wrong tree. In part, this is due to the relatively small amount of audio material that is contained in the acquisition in question; the bulk of the collection appears to be paper based. Ok, I can live with that. My questions regarding the digitization facilities still stand, but that's more attributable to my over-protective audio-visual archival tendencies than UCSC's own in-house capabilities.
Still there is something bugging me: this "social component." Does an academic institution have any place meddling in the world of open-source tagging? Again, I'm jumping ahead, but I'm comparing the type of social component that is supported by projects like Steve.Museum. I would argue this method works well for orphaned museum artifacts, but does this method suitably fit the academic institution's model for housing (and making available to researchers) archival material.
In a nutshell, is not the penultimate difference between museums and archives the genesis of the concept of context and provenance? In museums, artifacts re-discover old and new contexts in exhibitions; in archives context and provenance are carefully guarded against the affects of entropy through the maintenance of intellectual control. Where does social tagging fit into intellectual control? Or does it not, instead only finding a suitable fit in the realm of access? If the later is the case, then are we not at risk of repeating a pattern that we have already condemned as a "no-no": when digitization projects became so prevalent, the original argument from the profession was that these projects should be supported as a means of alternate access. The practicality of that notion having been shot down, the new method is to use digitization as a means to support preservation and thus access as well.
I'm all for getting the public involved in the "behind the scenes" of archives especially because any chance to get the public interested in archival material, research, history, culture... the list goes on. But if the cost is potentially alienating certain documents or items while others' status is raised over the rest, then the entire exercise is counter to traditional archival methodologies. I don't see how this could be beneficial in the long run.
Still there is something bugging me: this "social component." Does an academic institution have any place meddling in the world of open-source tagging? Again, I'm jumping ahead, but I'm comparing the type of social component that is supported by projects like Steve.Museum. I would argue this method works well for orphaned museum artifacts, but does this method suitably fit the academic institution's model for housing (and making available to researchers) archival material.
In a nutshell, is not the penultimate difference between museums and archives the genesis of the concept of context and provenance? In museums, artifacts re-discover old and new contexts in exhibitions; in archives context and provenance are carefully guarded against the affects of entropy through the maintenance of intellectual control. Where does social tagging fit into intellectual control? Or does it not, instead only finding a suitable fit in the realm of access? If the later is the case, then are we not at risk of repeating a pattern that we have already condemned as a "no-no": when digitization projects became so prevalent, the original argument from the profession was that these projects should be supported as a means of alternate access. The practicality of that notion having been shot down, the new method is to use digitization as a means to support preservation and thus access as well.
I'm all for getting the public involved in the "behind the scenes" of archives especially because any chance to get the public interested in archival material, research, history, culture... the list goes on. But if the cost is potentially alienating certain documents or items while others' status is raised over the rest, then the entire exercise is counter to traditional archival methodologies. I don't see how this could be beneficial in the long run.
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