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 hoofdstuk 3 180 william kilbride minding the gaps: digital preservation then and now 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 95-116 181

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2018 | | pagina 91