dynamic accrual of metadata relating to the record is continual. As with the archive,
metadata has no end, and its beginnings may actually precede the records to which it
relates (e.g., metadata embedded in systems design). Even if physically fixed in some
tangible manifestation, the record has never been a static intellectual object and
archiving as an activity cannot bind time, it can only capture and annotate
recordkeeping and record moments. As Eno states with regard to how a record is
pluralized, it is different each time an action is performed on or with, and every
action performed on or with a record adds to its metadata:
what we're talking about is not evolving the original, we're talking
about keeping the original and adding layers of annotation, you might say,
to layers of commentary to it. So it's slightly different from a generative
process where you plant a seed and it turns into something else. We want
the seed to stay intact as well." (p.57)
So, while the fixity of the archived record is a condition for demonstrating its
authenticity, and that fixity is demonstrated through metadata such as audit trails
and documentation of migrations, it remains conceptually impossible to fix either a
record or its metadata. McKemmish explains how continuum-based recordkeeping
addresses this additional paradox:
"Pluralisation involves disembedding the record from its multiple
organisational and/or personal contexts and carrying it through
spacetime. Thus recordkeeping processes fix the content and structure of
records, preserve their integrity by ensuring they are tamper-proof, and link
them to ever-widening layers of rich metadata about their multiple
contexts of creation and use. This enables them to be accessed, used and
interpreted in other spacetimes. In continuum terms, while a records
content and structure can be seen as fixed, in terms of its
contextualisation, a record is 'always in a process of becoming'
(McKemmish, 2016, p. 139).
This in turn points to the potential to use metadata to facilitate rupturing the
strictures of structure so that people, individually and collectively, can engage with
archives and their holdings in entirely new ways.
Metadata together with and apart from the objects with which they are associated can
have social lives: Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei's controversial 1995 piece
"Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn", where he deliberately dropped an urn that was
deemed to be priceless, sought to raise questions about the life and preservation of a
cultural heritage object, the assumption that is should remain fixed and stable, and
when, if ever, it might transform into another object. Influenced by the work of
scholars such as Kopytoff and Appadurai (1983), archival scholars such as Caswell
(2014) and Carbone (2017) have begun to explore the social lives, cultural
biographies and movements of archives and recordkeeping objects and their
metadata in order to explore these questions of fixity and stability, and to expose
issues of agency and affect in the generation of new and derivative objects out of
archival objects. Caswell traced the subsequent trajectories of 'mug shots'--
photographs taken of prisoners of the Khmer Rouge before they were executed and
their copies--across collections, exhibitions, publications and digitization projects
(Caswell, 2014). Carbone conducted an ethnographic investigation of how artists in
residence in Portland City Archives were inspired by one particular collection and
moved and transformed objects they found there into new spaces, interpretations
and ultimately, new objects (Carbone, 2017). In each case, some parts of the pre-
existing metadata associated with the objects travelled with them and were modified
and augmented. Metadata can also be separated from their associated object and
transformed over time. For example, metadata for an object can be incorporated
into a catalog for an exhibition that in turn may be reformulated into a monograph
on the same subject.
New views through metadata: Metadata have the potential to reveal the extent and
limits of different archival universes by providing the infrastructure that facilitates
meta-compilation, visualization and analysis. Diasporas of records can be discerned
and linked, and their contents can be indexed, abstracted and compiled to provide
new ways to understand and imagine the past. Similarly, they can support the
presentation of meta-level views of the scope, functions and infrastructure of
recordkeeping.
Metadata can indicate meaningful absences of records and ruptures in recordkeeping:
Archives operate in an often-contested world where the complete set of original
records rarely exists-maybe it was never created, maybe it or parts were not deemed
worthy of keeping, were defensively destroyed, or were hidden or lost. Metadata
helps us to explain and draw inferences in the face of such absence. It not only
supports objects that are present or in existence, it can also explain and interpolate
what is missing. There are many historical examples of records and the contents of
archives being lost or destroyed but their metadata, in forms such as classification
schemes, catalogs and abstracts survive (MacNeil, 2017). From that surviving
metadata we can infer something of what is missing as well as what its intellectual
and physical arrangement might have been, and even perhaps the contemporary
value or power attributed to it and what might have motivated its destruction. For
example, German record classification schemes were introduced in the Nuremberg
trials to stand for records destroyed by German authorities at the end of World War
II; and metadata for photographs of demolished Bedouin villages in Gaza have
become important for claims actions since they testify to their location when places
have been erased or renamed. Foscarini argues that records exist in a rhetorical
landscape and this allows us to see workarounds or irregularity in recordkeeping.
Beyond diplomatics, she recommends the use of genre theory to analyze the contexts
of records, contexts that are captured by means of metadata (2012). Metadata, for
example that relating to work flow and juridical requirements, can similarly be used
to indicate where a record has not been created but should have been, or should be.
Moreover, metadata can be the traces around which not only previously existing, but
also imagined records can be hung (Gilliland Caswell, 2017). Empty metadata
fields may also be meaningful. For example, an Armenian curator talks of
attempting to use retrospectively Dublin Core to describe museum objects dispersed
during the Armenian genocide and being faced with fields that will never be filled
because they cannot be (Hovhanissyan, lecture, 2017).
The Politics and Ethics of Metadata in a Plural World
Eno's 'wink' was not only to the phenomenon of complex and cumulative
instantiations and versions of metadata in the digital world, but also to how
contemplations of metadata and metadata characteristics surface professional
belief and value systems inherent in the long-term and efficient management of
objects under their purview. In the case of archives and recordkeeping, these might
include, for example, tensions between investing in metadata to support
archives in liquid times
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anne j. gilliland 'the wink that's worth a thousand words': a contemplation on
the nature of metadata and metadata practices in the archival world
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