Geographic Representation of Cultural Identity in Digital Projects and Digital Preservation

Digital projects and preservation require a variety of high-level skill sets, a lot of continuing education, and much expensive equipment. If an archive's job is to preserve and provide access to content donated by the public, to maintain that content because it is a snapshot in time of a particular cultural identity, and to provide access to as wide an audience as possible, digitization of an archive's contents makes good sense. An isolated archive that is a hub of a region can hold artifacts from towns and individuals for surrounding miles; unfortunately, it does not necessarily also hold the skill set, the budget, or the recognition of a need for education.

In cases where an archive is isolated, there are a few possibilities that can prevent under-representation of an isolated region's cultural identity:

(I don't include the care-taking approach here because that is the best way for an archive to become under-represented in the digital age.)

-Collaboration: Pooling all resources is probably the smartest way to prevent under-representation of a cultural identity. Collaboration between larger and smaller institutions are cheap, fast, and easy ways to get funding, talent, and publicity.

-New Skills Training: An organization can actively pursue good, inexpensive training from various places, and a retrenching of skills combined with new technological knowledge fosters recognition that a wider world--and a resultant future--exist along with a need that one's collection should be recognized in that wider world.

-Intra-institution skill harvesting: I just attended a digital preservation workshop, and Nancy McGovern, one of the educators, suggested that institutions seek skills by posting skill set needs on an intranet and that this could result in surprising developments.

-Speak to the public: If the public built the archive through donations, educating local populace about the need for publicity of a collection could result in local contribution of the needs of a facility.

These are just a few potential solutions that I'm kicking around, but as I look at them, I see that they all involve some form of collaboration or another. In this economy, a denial of a need for collaboration borders on stupidity at the individual level, and on gross negligence when one considers that the eye-on-the-prize goal is representing and preserving a culture's identity to the greatest extent. Archives in isolated regions might not realize how isolated they are until they try to reach out but don't have the abilities to do so.

I often hear people complain about how the East and West Coasts and big cities are the only places where television shows are set; I think it's a scary prospect to consider 20 years into the future to imagine what will be represented (based on current, good digital preservation planning)--and the holes left by cultures that would have been under-represented. If isolated institutions isolate themselves further through adamant refusal not to collaborate or assign appropriate resources and skills now, history teachers in 20 years might have trouble showing electronic versions of hand-drawn maps of those regions from 150 years prior to that.

Keeping Up with Your Homework, and Why It's Important

Although I have worked in technology for 14 years--from high school, through college, through grad school, through full-time employment--my educational background, as well as most of my interests, have centered around reading. All my degrees are in one breed of English--creative writing, medieval British literature, and now Technical communication/rhetoric. Like a duck to water, then, I read stuff when I need to learn about it, in digitization and technology. If I need to learn about digital repository trustworthiness, I dig it out of Google--and read it. If I need to know about World of Warcraft Cataclysm and when it comes out--I read it.

Either way, in my opinion, the world is at one's fingertips in the age of the Internet. We can find information about anything, and we can read about it. I consider it the height of irresponsibility--gross negligence, really--if someone trained in a discipline and working in that discipline does not also pursue as much information from the Web as s/he can. I was speaking with a librarian friend the other day about the Trusted Digital Repositories report and checklist because I'm preparing to attend a workshop for which these two things were requested reading. Now, these are things that I've encountered a few times before--first because I read about this information, and then in discussion with other librarians.

I have been repeatedly stunned, however, by the surprise in librarians' faces when I say, "This information is online." I will often receive links from them that contain reports from the early 2000's, and they send this to me as if this would be new information, because it was new to them.

I expressed this, in our conversation about the trusted digital repositories, to my librarian friend, who is also involved with digital initiatives, and he said that it's very common for librarians not to have read up on what they're practicing. I'm shocked by this. While I recognize that my background in various fields of English studies probably advantages me in literacy adaptability and critical thinking skills over, say, someone who is in Biomechanics, I have a lot of trouble understanding why a librarian would not pursue as much literature as is available to learn more about what is a fascinatingly evolving field.

So, if you're a librarian, and you don't read--get off your hiny and get to work. Start reading. What you learned from your MLS studies is going to expire--no matter what, it WILL expire, and you'd better be equipped with all new information you can find--even if it's free, Googled info.

(Thank you, Google, for your Palpatinian influences on organization in structure.)

Wikis, Blogs, Articles, Peer-Review Processes

When I was in a meeting today, someone asked for proof that another person is an expert in his field; he requested that this proof appear in the form of a blog post, a wiki, or some sort of other non-peer-review format.

This got me to thinking about the credence that academia has come to attach to Web 2.0 technologies. Another friend of mine recently published an article on Code4Lib (Jason Thomale, google his name; he's brilliant); this created a stir in the metadata, cataloging, and coding realm, much of which was displayed in Web 2.0 technologies, and this all has resulted in professional acclaim for him.

Having grown up with the academic attitude of publish or perish, where peer-reviewed articles are the only valid publication means by which tenure may be judged, I am growing to enjoy this progressive trend.

There are obvious questions.
How do we trust information that is randomly posted online, with no vetting process, and can unvetted information be cited with the same weight and merit as peer-reviewed publications?

I am reminded of the Wikipedia incident in which a man representing himself as a PhD had posted assorted history or art (I can't remember which) information; the public was stunned when it developed that this man was simply an amusing amateur. Was his information any less valid because he had misrepresented his identity? If I remember correctly--and shame on me for not looking this up prior to blogging about it--his information indeed was accurate, contained few errors.

Identity and reputation online are built, and then the real world intrudes. If the real world doesn't jive properly with the online identity one has created, one can find oneself cyber-culturally snubbed. I've discussed online identity manipulation before, but what about online reputation building? Reputation gives credence to what one publishes online; since reputation is the most important currency in the online realm of cyberculture and Web 2.0, the aura of a good reputation can credit one's words more strongly than it can in peer-review publishing circles.

Audience, reputation, and online publishing.