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 222 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 223

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2017 | | pagina 113