AI Powered Tools for Improving Usability in Digital Archiving

This essay navigates the digital Courret Archive housed at the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. The essay reflects on a series of photographs in which Afro-Peruvian women are depicted holding or sat next to young children. In the digital archive, these women, who presumably worked as wet nurses or nannies in Lima towards the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, remain either unnamed or named homogenously by their domestic occupation. The essay asks about the screening of repeated structures of hiding in the digital archive, interrogating the ways by which these speak to us viewers about concealed forms of (racialized) care. By placing these photos in their contexts of production and digital reproduction, the essay argues, first, that the photos are the visual face of the consolidation of a very contradictory oligarchic government, which sustained the political project of the so-called República Aristocrática. Secondly, it proposes that in the digital Courret Archive, the Black maternal is visualized as both foundation and threat, yet it ultimately reaches the contemporary viewer as a trace of “abundance,” what Elizabeth Edward’s defines as the affective force that emerges from a subject’s presence in a photograph (2015).

The current state of digital archives in Ukraine, which are platforms of digital (electronic) content that provide access to various digital archival resources in the global information space and support the global concept of digitization of the most valuable archival heritage. Emphasis is placed on the priority tasks for all archival institutions, which demonstrates the main, modern direction of the policy of archival development in Ukraine, which corresponds to modern trends. The basic features of the digital archive are determined. Emphasis is placed on foreign and domestic specialists who highlight the main tasks and approaches to the digitization of archival resources. The main functions of digital (electronic) archive and its types are analyzed, the basic characteristics of grouping of archival electronic information resources in the process of their source study are presented. The focus is on projects that are already operating in the information space and successfully provide access to their digital resources, namely digitized documents, photographs, audio, video, materials. Emphasis was placed on the need for cooperation of specialists in the digitization of archival materials and the creation of a single platform for the presentation of digital archival resources in a convenient version for users of archival information.

Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures

The advent of digital and networking technologies has begun to embrace the genesis of the next-generation digital archive. The inclusion of cross-domain objects like manuscript documents, audio and video recordings, photographs, paintings, sculptures and other digitised cultural heritage materials increases the complexity of digital archiving in terms of preservation, collection, and discovery of these resources. Introducing a high definition information retrieval system to exhibit the library and museum’s digital resources to a maximum number of users in an open-access environment can satisfy the S. R. Ranganathan’s fourth law – save the time of reader as well as the staffs. Nevertheless, from the perspective of acquiring an advanced OPAC view (web-scale discovery interface) with index-based searching, metadata harvesting, and accessing the physical as well as digital holdings is always a better option for Archival Collections Management System (ACMS). This paper illustrates the fundamental notions and applications of ArchivesSpace, a useful open-source digital archiving toolkit of the contemporary world and analyses its relevance in digital language archiving.

Creation of a fully digital pathology slide archive by high-volume tissue slide scanning

Applying the technology acceptance model in a study of the factors affecting usage of the Taiwan digital archives system

Archives have long been a key concern of academic debates about truth, memory, recording and power and are important sites for social sciences and humanities research. This has been the case for traditional archives, but these debates have accelerated with the digital transformation of archives. The proliferation of digital tools and the fast-growing increase in digital materials have created very large digitised and born-digital archives. This article investigates how new digital archives continue existing archival practices while at the same time discontinuing them. We present novel methodologies and tools for changing memory and power relations in digital archives through new ways of reassembling marginalised, non-canonical entities in digital archives. Reassembling digital archives can take advantage of the materiality and the algorithmic processuality of digital collections and reshape them to inscribe lost voices and previously ignored differences. Digital archives are not fixed and are changed with new research and political questions and are only identified through new questions. The article presents six distinct techniques and strategies to reassemble digital archives and renders these according to three different types of new digital archives. We consider both the extension of archives towards evidence that is otherwise thrown away as well as the provision of new intensive, non-discriminatory viewpoints on existing collections.

The rise of crowdsourced and participatory digital platforms which aim to make visible the experiences of otherwise marginalised people are significant within the broader landscape of digitally mediated community spaces. One example of such media is Queering the Map , a digital storymapping platform where users anonymously pin ‘queer moments’ and memories to places. While the mediation of affect and intimacy in digital spaces among queer people is increasingly attended to in scholarly work, the cartographic and archival remains hitherto underexplored. Drawing on an analysis of almost 2000 micro-stories geolocated to Australia, in this article we explore various aspects of story contribution that situate Queering the Map as a lively cartographic archive. Rather than necessarily anonymous (as the platform dictates), the posts, we argue, entail various deliberated directions or gestures, encoded for audiences: what we term stories for someone . We highlight these publicly private stories’ connective and affective underpinnings, and the political potentialities (and problems) therein for queer belonging and community-building. In doing so we seek to contribute to scholarship on digital archives, crowdsourcing, and advance conceptualisations of digital intimacies.

Archival repositories in universities have the responsibility of preserving and availing records that are trustworthy, authentic, reliable, and possess integrity. This is a tall order in the current technological dispensation where digital information systems and the internet are the kingpins driving the wheel of corporate governance the world over. This article explicates findings of a larger study that investigated digital archiving in six public universities in Kenya. The study was guided by three objectives: (1) to establish the state of digital archiving readiness in selected Kenyan universities; (2) to examine the risk exposures for digital archives in the universities, and (3) to propose strategies for safeguarding digital archives in the universities. The theoretical basis of the study constituted the records continuum model, the Open Archival Information System Reference model, and the Archives and Records Management Association Records Management Maturity model. Mixed methods triangulation was adopted following a multiple-case (embedded) design using a cross-sectional survey. The target population was 451 out of which a sample of 205 participants was purposely selected using stratified sampling techniques. The study found that public universities in Kenya were generally not ready for digital archiving, and were therefore exposed to records technology risks, legal and regulatory risks, administrative risks, and records control risks. Hence, the institutions faced challenges in the management of digital archives from creation and after their declaration as archives. The study proposed a digital archiving framework for adoption by public universities and other academic institutions.

Intellectual property laws present formidable challenges for digital cultural archiving projects. While cultural institutions may be permitted to make works available to the public, these rights may not cover online publishing or reproduction. Consequently, institutions undertake time-consuming, resource-intensive clearance processes in order to secure licenses for displaying copyright protected cultural works online. In response to these challenges, the New Media Collaboration Centre at York University (Toronto) has developed Art mob, a content management system (CMS) with a dialogic approach to copyright informed by the fair dealing provisions of Canadian copyright law. The user interface design of this CMS facilitates uses covered by fair dealing, enables administrators to enter and display information regarding the layering of rights in cultural works, solicits information about unidentified rights holders and the creation of works from communities of users, and invites rights holders to assert their rights and license works.

This paper offers a conspectus of several online dance archives made in the context of the Portuguese research project TKB. The online searches we conducted from 2018 to the end of 2019 suggested four broad categories of resources for what one may call ‘online dance archives’. Aiming to observe how dance resources are available on the internet, we made each category correspond to a different operation – to collect (to build up a collection), to accumulate (to gather almost random material), to store (to organize according to a set of rules), to assemble (to compose and curate material). And we posed the same set of questions: for each of these categories: what is the mission of the archive, who are its subjects and objects, and which community of users does it bring together? The outcome is both a general overview, and the possibility of a comparative approach. Our original motivation has been to survey and to analyse a sample of available online resources for dance documentation and/or archiving, in order to feed TKB future projects and experiences. Starting from the TKB project perspective, and aiming at categorizing the different approaches to storage, curation, ownership and availability reflected by those archival platforms, we finally identified three major challenges in the relation between dance and the digital archive: the question of access, the ontology of dance and archive – what it is, what it has been, and what ‘dance and archiving’ can become in the future –, and the ‘Will to archive’ (cf. Lepecki 2010 ). Each one of these challenges will eventually provoke new questions as to the future of the TKB project and of its team of researchers, and the nature of the work they may undertake.

The digital hospital information technology in radiology

The purpose of this community service is training and workshop to guide and assist teachers, employees and students in introducing and understanding and implementing digital archive management with Windows Explorer, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word and PHP MYSQL.. The resulting output is a digital archive book that will be useful in guiding teachers and as one of the teaching materials in carrying out education and teaching in vocational high schools. The methodology used in the implementation of this community service activity is action research activities consisting of Planning, Preparation, Implementation (actions), Observation and Evaluation and Reflection. The conclusion of community service is the implementation of community service activities through guidance and assistance with the results of increased knowledge about digital archives, skills in managing digital archives, expertise in using digital information technology and being able to apply digital archives management and support for the course of an organization.

Creative Economy has become the global trend, many advanced countries have to put great efforts on the promotion and application of digital archiving. In this study, we attempt to define the service quality factors of digital archiving e-service system and then identify the crucial factors for attracting more public users. In addition, through the applying of Kano Model, the service quality factors of Web2.0 digital archiving system are analyzed so as to design digital archiving e-service system that meets related service quality. However, this study hoped that more internet users can be encouraged to participate and share digital archiving content, and the wisdom of more people can be collected to create and promote the archiving content in the future.

Against Accumulation Brian Connolly (bio) We might, with a little work, productively imagine the archive as the historical unconscious, with the evidence therein the near endless series of signifiers. If we were to push this analogy a little further, we might say that the archive is structured like the unconscious (which is structured like language), and if this is the case, then we might be apprehensive about the relationship between the archive, evidence, and “the real,” or reality. The real, we know from the work of Jacques Lacan, is that which is foreclosed, impossible to be symbolized, and thus incapable of being represented in language. It is also undifferentiated, whole—the cut of signification (castration) does not exist there. It is that which we desire, that impossible place without lack. If this is the case, then the archive will never, no matter how much evidence we accumulate, yield reality. Yet, for all of this, recent accumulative trends in digitization of archives (more accessible evidence searched more easily) and extranational scales of analysis (which add geographic spaces in order to challenge the hegemony of the nation) have led to a neo-empiricism that, once again, chases that elusive phantasm of reality. In one sense, this empirical, positivist search for reality is not particularly new. Since at least the nineteenth century, the archive has been figured as the repository of documentary evidence. It was the institutional site where evidence could be found to document the veracity of historical narratives. Of course, this empiricist account of the archive has long been critiqued: think of Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever or Joan Scott in “The Evidence of Experience.” In some instances, the capacity of both evidence and the archive to satisfy our contemporary political desires is called into question, as in Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”1 For Scott, a critical relation to evidence shifts our work from “a belief in the unmediated relationship between words and things, to one that takes all categories of analysis as contextual, contested, and contingent.”2 In a word, Scott asks historians to acknowledge that we read evidence—we do not discover unmediated accounts of that elusive phantasm, the past “as it actually was.”3 Yet no matter how many critiques, empiricism persists. Recently, a confluence of technology, framework, and new practices of reading have resulted in a newfound fascination with an empirical [End Page 172] orientation toward evidence, one frequently offered as a substitute (or antidote) for now supposedly “tired” hermeneutics. The digitization of archives (and the attendant quasi-disciplinary formation we have come to call digital humanities) and global (and other extranational) studies have engendered an accumulative logic toward evidence and the archive.4 Supposedly, the more evidence we have the better, whether through the multiplication of pieces of evidence or the ability to search keywords across a previously unimaginable number of sources. This move has been accompanied by the emergence of new practices of reading—distant, surface, descriptive—that embrace a certain kind of empiricism—one designed, in part, to move across a large body of evidence, something at which older, tired, and out-of-date critical and hermeneutic practices would be less adept. Yet the digital and the global stand as sentries at the archive, orienting our analyses and capacities for critique. As Derrida wrote of the archons (those who secured the archive and its documents), “They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives.”5 The archons of the contemporary scene of historical writing might just be the digital humanities and the spatial turn. While there are certainly critical projects that come out of both domains—indeed, my own work has benefitted greatly from the digitization of archives—there is also a celebratory tone that is primarily about accumulation. Despite its insistent antihermeneutic logic, it is a hermeneutic imperative nonetheless—accumulate more and more, think beyond and against the nation, but always do it in a manner, aided and abetted by digitization, which adds rather than subtracts. The tendency among historians and others to lionize the digital...