Building integrity for accountability in public information systems: Research from Africa and South Asia

Michael Hoyle, currently Project Manager and Lead Researcher at the International Records Management Trust. This is a London-based NGO which concerns itself with helping developing countries establish electronic records-keeping tools and wrestling with the obstacles that are related to this endeavor.

Urban Archives

Giorgia Aiello and Tom Dobrowoky introduced us to urbanarchives.org a collection of media that captures the images, texts, and general experiences of public spaces in urban areas. Urban Archives houses a number of such student projects: a historical look at Aurora Avenue, an overnight report on Sunset Bowl, and an ethnography of two city bus lines (the 271 and the 7).

Our presenters shared the pedagogical utility of Urban Archives. By having (Communications?) students choose their own projects to contribute to the archive, the instructors showed them how to recognize their own interests as valid areas of academic inquiry. A student’s general interest in graffiti or a city district (e.g. the International District), under the coaching of the instructors, could be transformed into a valuable contribution to the Archive. Students discovered the resources that they had (finding insiders, etc…) and practice difficult tasks such as learning to write photo annotations that fit a descriptive genre. Photography for archival purposes, as another example, requires a particular mindset that is deliberate and reflexive. The photographer ought to be aware of context, a perspective that should be reflected in both the photos taken and the notes taken to accompany that photo.

The Urban Archive also acts as a bridge to the community. Giorgia and Tom relate how the community has often reconnected with the project: newspapers have reported on the site and artists of the archived works have contacted them (some with corrections to the annotations).

From an archival perspective, the project leaders, as editors, spoke of the future home for the Urban Archives: they want to contribute this to the larger University Library (I think). Quality of the photographs is another issue: the editors standards for a photograph require particular a particular resolution; this causes technical restrictions, for example, cellphone photography does not meet those standards. Meta-data and (quality) annotation is the major necessity that limits what materials enter the archive.

Electronic Piers Plowman: Implementing an Edition of a Six-Hundred-Year-Old-Poem for Twenty-First Century Students

Terry Brooks (iSchool) and Miceal Vaughan (UW Textual Studies) are collaborating on producing a digital version of Piers Plowman, a fourteenth century English poem that is the subject of textual studies and whose interpretation is taught to undergraduate and graduate students alike. The goal of the project is to make the variety of interpretations and versions of the poem digital accessible. Terry Brooks has developed and is refining an XML schema that is capable of encoding the different versions of the text and accompanying annonations to it.

In today’s talk, he presented the XML Schema as well as an XML editor that allows a scholar like Miceal Vaughan to add alternate versions of a word, write annotations, and, in essence, to create a master copy/archive of Piers Plowman in a digital format.

Note: [link to the Electronic Piers Plowman project page]

Orders of Intentionality in the Archival Theory of Arrangement

Heather MacNeil, Associate Professor and Chair of the Archival Studies Program in the School of Library, Archival & Information Studies at The University of British Columbia.

Heather challenged archival institutions to recognize that the materials which they preserve are not the best reflection of original intent, nor can they ever quite be.

Information Security Compliance: A train-wreck of laws, practices, and technology

Debriefing on the First Annual Information Security Compliance and Risk Management Institute: Topics, Problems and Future Directions

Barabara Endicott-Popvsky, John Christiansen, Jane Winn

John detailed the “train-wreck” combination of technological development, information policies, and legal standards. In brief: Information technologies are new. Information protection standards are even newer. Information protection laws are generally newer still. Information protection laws are proliferating and overlap.

Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making

Meghan Dougherty, PhD Candidate, Communication

(guest blog by Shaun Kane)

Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making in a collection of archived objects

This week Meghan presented her work on the Wayfinder project (http://www.wayfinder.webarchivist.org). This project is part of Meghan’s dissertation work, and is part of the larger Web Archivist project presented previously.

The Wayfinder project continues the exploration of representing digital scholarship digitally. By moving beyond traditional paper- based formats, we may explore alternate representations for scholarly information. Different media present different affordances, and may expose different social and epistemological issues. Wayfinder leverages the affordances of the web to enable new interactions with scholarly information. On the web, readers are able to act as content producers themselves, and can engage in a recursive dialogue with authors. The project also enables new modes of accessing and understanding scholarly information by allowing users to navigate and annotate data, and to create their own paths through a data set.