The foundations of this user-focussed and value-based approach are set firmly
within the digital preservation standards. It is surprising that there was so little
practical talk about how to test, predict or report changing user requirements and
how to embed these within the ongoing delivery of digital preservation services.
This oversight within 'Mind the Gap' seems to be repeated in the subsequent
literature too. The energy with which organizational and technical challenges have
been researched and resolved does not seem to be matched by an understanding
of the user communities that repositories are established to support. Stated more
formally, it is hard to track the impact of changing user needs on meaningful
re-evaluations of the representation information required to ensure the
independent utility of a digital object, nor is it clear that they represent an ongoing
relationship with a designated community.
Digital preservation facilities that ignore users end up with two difficulties: their
repositories simply won't work and the impact they seek to deliver is lost. If true, it is
a significant risk to the relevance and vitality of the community. Is it true that the
digital preservation community doesn't care about users enough to embed them
into the day-to-day operation of its facilities? The apparent silence can be explained
in perhaps two ways.
In some cases, digital preservation is embedded within institutions that already
have robust and well-documented user bases, with feedback mechanisms to report
changes and trends in user needs. That's certainly true of the larger memory
institutions that already have a public profile and therefore need to manage user
expectations. Such services may not be reported in the digital preservation literature
because they are so well established that they are not of research interest, and partly
because when they are described it is at different conferences and with different
peers. In other cases, it may be that efforts are so concentrated on submission that
digital preservation research just hasn't made it to users yet.
Each of these answers is plausible but neither really accounts for the silence about
ongoing tests and assessments. There is a pattern to research but the need to capture
and track the requirements of designated communities should not be not an
afterthought in digital preservation architectures.
There is a further and perhaps more demanding challenge in the relationship
between repositories and their users, embedded deeply within the digital
preservation literature and most clearly articulated in the OAIS: digital preservation
technologies have yet to face up to the significant challenges of privilege and
decolonialization which have arisen in the last decade. Again, considering the
significant impacts that discourses of inclusion have had since 2006, it's perhaps
not surprising that these subtle challenges were not obvious then.
One of the strengths of digital preservation has been its willingness to adopt tools
and approaches from many different disciplines. For example, OAIS is the product of
the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems. To some extent that origin
haunts the language and assumptions of the model, and because OAIS is the lingua
franca of digital preservation generally, the values and norms of space science lurk
below the surface of just about every digital preservation conversation.
This contribution has been immensely welcome and potent, but it also should be
set alongside important trends in archival and museological theory which tend to
the view that meaning-making can be hard and contradictory. The textual turn of
cultural hermeneutics and poststructuralism in particular has been controversial,
and it has been argued that the whole genre of post-truth informatics has some
origin in the legacy of postmodernism.21 It has certainly been a mixed blessing for
archives, libraries and museums.
On one hand, the recognition that knowledge production is a fundamental tool
in the reproduction of power has transformed memory institutions from the
gatekeepers of authoritative resilience to the enablers of progressive narrative(s).
Derrida22 equated archives with a sort of house arrest: both as the source and
containment of power, arranged to the practical convenience of the authorities, and
only shared on asymmetrical terms with the public. It's no small accomplishment to
note that for three decades now any number of disenfranchised communities have
taken back control of cultural storehouses to establish new and often conflicting
histories that subvert established norms and empower those previously excluded.
Archives, libraries and museums have largely welcomed these new if at times unruly
patrons on the assumption that if the epistemology of the institution is not
fundamentally about justice then, by default, its purpose is to sustain injustice.23
On the other hand, if signifier and signified are in permanent renegotiation, and if
context is the last and only arbiter of meaning, then anyone can interpret everything
to mean anything. That seems significantly more challenging in the context of a
memory institutions where the absence of authorial voice intensifies the
impossibility of authoritative meaning-making. In a crisis of relativism and self-
congratulatory truth-making, where power is self-creating and context is fluid,
what's the use of archives at all? The legacy of postmodernism could be summarized
as follows: everyone empowered by their own narrative; and everyone empowered
to deny everyone else's.
If the challenge to meaning-making began with postmodernism then it has been
turbo-charged by technology. Francophone theorists of the 1960's and 1970's
legitimated the challenge to legitimacy while anglophone engineers of the 1970's
and 1980's delivered the machinery of change. The result: anyone can assemble their
own history from the many ubiquitous sources that they chose not to ignore; they
can publish it; and in so doing can find an audience to share their pain; and then all
can live secure in self-made echo-chambers of reflexive half-truths repeated so often
than they might as well be whole truths. That's becoming the all-too-common
experience of social media and it's no wonder it's become fashionable to call it
anti-social media.
The difficult history of meaning-making in the late 20th and early 21st century
seems strangely at odds with the processes and norms adopted in digital
preservation, especially with respect to representation information. Representation
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21 D'Ancona, Matthew Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back (Ebury, London, 2017)
22 Derrida, Jacques and Prenowitz Eric Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (Diacritics 25, 1995, pp 9-63) p. 10.
23 O'Neill, Mark 'Essentialism, adaptation and justice: Towards a new epistemology of museums' in Museum
Management and Curatorship 21, (2006) pp 95-116
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