(4939,3,'2013-06-27 19:39:47','2013-06-27 19:39:47','<em>Based on our experiences in the academic library, archives, and data curation communities, we present an informal discussion of the relationships between these branches of information science. In this conversational exchange, we decipher concepts of data curation for librarians and archivists while also translating library and archival theory and tradition for the data environment. Beginning with basic questions about the day-to-day realities of managing scientific data in comparison to digital library collections, we discuss roles and practices, seeking both to identify common goals and functions as well as to explore where and how our cultures diverge. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and together our fields support the diverse and ever-changing needs of researchers and information consumers in distinct but complementary ways. </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong>Seeing a Family Resemblence</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Kristen: In 2006, when I decided to go to library school to be an archivist, Lynn was working at Scripps Institution of Oceanography as an information manager. I wasn’t totally clear on what her job was, but I knew it involved data. The first time one of my library school professors brought up “metadata” in class I got excited: “Lynn always talks about metadata!” Since I took my position as Digital Services Librarian at the University of Scranton in 2008, I have come across more and more data issues in both the archival side of my job (digital collections) and in the librarian side of my job (supporting digital scholarship). I started calling Lynn for help.</p>\r\n\r\n<blockquote>Lynn: When I started library school, one of the most exciting aspects for me was learning about this mature, sophisticated ecosystem that already existed for gathering, describing, categorizing, and managing information. There was a system of roles, infrastructure, services, and expertise that conceptually mapped so well to the data world. Kristen would send me archives articles that really resonated with my data issues. It became clear that our respective realms of archives, libraries, and data are fundamentally linked.</blockquote>\r\nK: We quickly noticed, though, that we often have different philosophies about information management and that we tend to use different vocabulary to describe what we do. As we started to untangle the complex relationships between archives, libraries, and data, we found value in each other’s knowledge and expertise.\r\n<blockquote>L: I see data curation as a discipline that cuts across the Library and Information Sciences field. Data curation combines skills from librarianship, archives, information literacy, metadata, technical services, and many other areas. By identifying and articulating similarities and differences between data curation and recognized aspects of LIS, we can plan better for more integrated systems, services, and roles.</blockquote>\r\nK: One of the common (though admittedly simplistic) distinctions drawn between archivists and librarians is a difference in how we prioritize our goals. Both professions are interested in information access and preservation, but librarians prioritize immediate, affordable access while archivists prioritize long-term preservation. Where does data curation fit in? Do your goals as a curator of scientific data differ from the goals of librarians and archivists?\r\n<blockquote>L: The broad goal of data curation is to support scientific research through enabling long-term reuse of data. On the ground, that means data curators work across multiple levels: from defining and supporting strategic metadata creation early in the research cycle, through documentation about research processing, to capturing research “products” and preserving them for reuse. It seems like this is a blend between library and archives goals with support services, immediate access, and preservation all included in data curation. Given that we share the same ultimate goal of making information accessible now and into the future, I think the data community can learn a lot from both the archives and library communities.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Containers, Content, and Context</strong>\r\n\r\nK: Likewise, I think archivists and librarians have a lot to learn from data curators. For starters, I’m not sure I understand what “data” curation really is. When I think “data,” I think of numbers in a spreadsheet. Beyond that, I don’t have a good mental picture of what data looks like.\r\n<blockquote>L: A good working definition of “data” for LIS professionals is “workable/usable chunks of content,” whether values in a printed journal article table, numbers in a spreadsheet, pixels in an image, etc. For example, you can think of a digital humanities scholar viewing the text inside a book as data. But I think your question hints at a broader difference between library and data work—data are the content, libraries are usually more interested with the container. I think it\'s a granularity issue.</blockquote>\r\nK: That\'s a good point. At my library, the way we manage our collections, and the way that users access our collections, does center on physical or digital “containers.” Our books are stored in a different place than our microfilm, for example, and our streaming media is stored in a different place than the text and image files in my digital collections. I think some of my confusion about data curation stems from not understanding what kind of “container” your data is in. What formats do data usually come in? What kinds of files do data curators need to manage and preserve?\r\n<blockquote>L: Data come in many containers, from different types of files to databases and paper logbooks. In some ways we need to manage and preserve all of them. From a scientific perspective, though, it doesn’t matter what kind of container is used, so we have a lot more flexibility in moving content around. There are exceptions to this rule, but in general it is the content—the measurements, observations, model predictions, and values, for instance—that is important.</blockquote>\r\nK: Doesn\'t format play a role in long-term access, though? For archivists, format is a major concern in digital preservation planning. We worry about how to preserve different kinds of files over time in the face of software and hardware obsolescence.\r\n<blockquote>L: In data, the bigger question is “what functionality do we need to offer?” Long-term format decisions will lean heavily on that answer. While we absolutely need to preserve access and are looking for strategies for avoiding obsolescence, the primary aim of scientific data curation is to enable future use of the data, not necessarily to enable access to the original scientist’s files. Carrying forward the data format and container is not nearly as crucial as capturing the data context (for example, the conditions under which the data were collected).</blockquote>\r\nK: Preserving context is a priority for archivists as well, but it seems like we have different understandings of what “context” is or should be. Archivists want to be able to ensure that future users can access the content of archival documents, but we also want to preserve the “look and feel” of the information environment in which the file was created. To me, file format is a part of the context in which a record was created.\r\n<blockquote>L: There is a trade-off here for scientific data; sometimes context can get in the way. For instance, we often see Excel files with multiple tables per sheet, color-coded cells, and notes mixed with values. While all of that formatting can show the process used by the original researcher and may be valuable to a science historian, other researchers looking to reuse the data need to manually sift through the file to find the content they need.</blockquote>\r\nK: That’s an interesting difference from traditional archival practice. In order to capture the context in which records were created, archivists typically organize our collections based on provenance (what office or person they came from), and we usually maintain original order, even if that makes individual documents more difficult to find—that is, even if that makes the collection less functional or less accessible to the end user. That said, one of the things I like about working with digitized materials is that I have more freedom with arrangement. I can organize my digital collections in a more accessible way, noting in the metadata how the original, physical documents are arranged. What aspects of context do you try to capture for your data?\r\n<blockquote>L: With scientific data, the scientist and the scientist’s intent are important aspects of the data context. For field scientists, they (and sometimes only they) know what actually happened out in the field, and what oddities might emerge during data processing (for example, “That reflectance value looks strange. Remember on that cruise, though, the captain was new to the ship and wasn’t very good at keeping the boat steady while we deployed? It might be a shadow signature”). Maybe the researcher switched their sampling plan partway through the study because their experience told them that the really interesting thing was happening slightly outside of the planned area. Their data are a reflection of all of the physical, intellectual, and instinctual decisions made, capturing parts of the resulting experience. All of that context is often essential to interpreting the data, but it can’t be easily included in metadata. Our standards aren’t yet mature enough to be able to communicate to an end user the context in which the data were created, and data creators don’t have the habit of including that information in documentation.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Metadata </strong>\r\n\r\nK: So it seems like both data curators and digital archivists face a common challenge of creating and capturing complex, contextual metadata in systematic, effective, and (hopefully!) standardized ways.\r\n<blockquote>L: Absolutely! I would add that metadata need to be useful, sharable, and discoverable, along with machine-, human-, and increasingly browser- and search engine-readable. I would definitely consider metadata to be an area needing more research.</blockquote>\r\nK: While we’re talking about metadata, are there “levels” of metadata in data curation? That is, archivists can describe information at the collection level, series level, item level, and even page level, but librarians don’t usually think this way—it’s more like one object (for example, one book), one bibliographic record.\r\n<blockquote>L: Levels are a hugely important part of data in the sciences. Data need description at multiple levels, though our levels and terminology are not yet well defined. Even the term “dataset” is poorly defined; the content and nature of datasets vary widely. One dataset might contain one type of data from a single field survey, while another might aggregate years of field studies with multiple data types into a dataset. “Collection,” “project,” “study,” “file,” “record,” and “granule” are other important terms relating to levels, though there is still discussion about what these mean. Despite the lack of consensus in language, data curators are ideally collecting metadata at many different levels. There is always a struggle to capture as much metadata as possible given limited resources and an evolving understanding of what metadata we actually need.</blockquote>\r\nK: There’s a similar tension between quantity and quality in digital collections. Given limited resources, is it better to make more content available more quickly, with less metadata? Or is deep and detailed metadata more valuable to potential users, even if it means that it takes us longer to publish new content? A well-known paper by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner, called “<a title=\"More Product, Less Process\" href=\"http://archivists.metapress.com/content/c741823776k65863/fulltext.pdf\">More Product, Less Process</a>,” [PDF] ((Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” <i>American Archivist</i> 68 (2005): 208-63.)) encouraged archivists to decrease the time they spent processing physical collections in order to maximize the quantity of archival resources available to the public, at the expense of in-depth description and intellectual control. The idea of “more product, less process” (MPLP) is often applied to digital collections as well as traditional archives. ((See, for example, Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” <i>American Archivist</i> 73 (2010): 175-203.)) On a practical level, I determine how deeply we’ll describe a collection based on how much value I think that description will add for our users. What kind of metadata do users tend to look for in the data world?\r\n<blockquote>L: We keep metadata about a project (very high level, related to funding awards or research theme) for contextual information and for discovery, since many researchers know about projects in their fields; however, that project-level description doesn’t really help with understanding the data themselves. So we use metadata at the “dataset” level to provide context for the actual data, to help researchers who aren’t familiar with the project find what they are looking for, and to give credit to the data creators. Beyond this discovery level, metadata creation and prioritization get tricky; usability requirements start to depend on what the data (re)user is trying to do, and domain knowledge starts to become more and more helpful. I add the “(re)” here to point out that especially observational data available online have often already been used; acknowledging the original intent and use of the data is important when trying to carry forward data context.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Creators and Users</strong>\r\n\r\nK: That brings us to the idea of “users.” All three fields are service-oriented—we want to help people—but I wonder if we are serving different “customers.” My library is open to the public, but our mission is to support the scholarly needs of the University community; that is, our students and faculty are our most important users. My digital collections, though, have a more nebulous user base. Web analytics indicate that these collections are being used off campus, but unless we get a reference question, I don\'t have a concrete idea of who those external users are or what needs they may have.\r\n<blockquote>L: This is true for data as well. Making data openly available online means we have less information about our users. We are more in line with public-library patron-privacy policies. “User” is a particularly loaded term for my project right now. So far, our main system users are data providers as opposed to data (re)users. Once our system and metadata mature a bit, we expect to be working with data (re)users as well, but for now we are mostly working with scientists originally gathering and depositing data.</blockquote>\r\nK: How do you talk to your data creators? How do they view their data?\r\n<blockquote>L: From a field-science perspective, there is often a deeply personal connection between a scientist and their data. These scientists fought tooth and nail to get funding to go into the field; they trained a group of people to help them do the data gathering; they worked long hours, often in less-than-ideal conditions, to collect the data they needed. For many researchers, each dataset is an extension of their career and understanding.</blockquote>\r\nK: I’m just starting to get questions about best practices for information management from faculty members on my campus, primarily humanities scholars seeking more effective ways to take, store, search, and organize their notes, and I suspect they feel similarly, although they may not refer to their notes as “data.” Anecdotally, they are most interested in technology as a way to improve their data collection; they seem far less concerned with (and in some cases strongly against) sharing their aggregated data with other scholars. That said, there’s been an explosion of digital humanities research using public or shared data sets (for example, textual analyses using Google’s Ngram viewer). Is this kind of data reuse happening with scientific data?\r\n<blockquote>L: I think scale has to be part of the reuse discussion. Data are reused all the time within the context of an individual researcher or strongly coordinated lab. Researchers who go out into the field regularly build long-term datasets from observations and reuse those “living” datasets over the course of a career, in some cases. In the field sciences, though, this kind of data is really difficult to analyze once you are outside of that personal or lab context. At a larger scale, some data tend to be more homogeneous and collected from the start with reuse in mind. For example, in the Earth sciences, satellite data are regularly reused in many types of research. One of the challenges in data curation is bridging between scales, between domains with complex and heterogeneous data and those with more homogeneous data. There is often a disconnect between researchers who focus on gathering unique observational data and researchers looking to reuse those observations in other research. Data creators don\'t necessarily have the same incentives as data reusers.</blockquote>\r\nK: That’s something I see in my archival work as well. There’s sometimes a disconnect between the information needs of campus departments that create content with archival value versus the departments that use our archival collections most frequently. For example, our public relations office produces wonderful publications and fantastic photographs of the campus, but in their work, photos or documents more than a few years old are no longer valuable. They need fast access to fresh content, so adding detailed descriptions or captions to those files isn’t a good use of their staff time. On the other hand, the alumni office wants to put together slideshows and exhibits for reunions, and to them, being able to search for and access a twenty-year-old photograph of a certain student (or especially a donor) is incredibly important.\r\n\r\n<strong>Roles </strong>\r\n\r\nK: So it seems like we both serve as mediators between creators and end users. What other roles do data curators play?\r\n<blockquote>L: We haven’t yet completely defined all of the components of data curation, nor who should manage each. There aren’t yet clear roles. What is clear though is that data curation can’t be done in a vacuum. To create a useful and usable data ecosystem including infrastructure, expertise, services, and longevity, we need multiple perspectives at the table. Data gathering scientists, data reuse scientists, technologists, documentation experts, administrators, data managers, data organization gurus, access experts, and preservationists all need to be part of the conversation. For now at least, I see data curators as generalists and facilitators. How does this compare to LIS roles?</blockquote>\r\nK: I think our roles really depend on our institutions and the other resources available to scholars. At major research universities, subject librarians and even entire libraries can be subject specialized, but at my (masters-level) institution, I have to wear multiple hats and fill multiple roles. I run the library\'s digital collections, but I also serve as a subject specialist for chemistry, biology, physics, and environmental science; provide information-literacy instruction; and support library initiatives in emerging technologies and digital scholarship. In the course of a single day, I might be teaching students about Google\'s search algorithm, helping a faculty member with Mendeley, describing old photos in our digital collections, and using social media to promote library services and collections.\r\n<blockquote>L: Data Information Literacy is emerging as an extension and adaptation of more traditional Information Literacy programs. Some are saying libraries should engage with this type of instruction, while others suggest that it should come from the departments. What do you think?</blockquote>\r\nK: I\'ve been thinking about data literacy a lot lately, especially considering the high visibility of data analysis during the 2012 presidential campaign. There’s clearly a need to educate end users about data, and I think librarians and departments have a role to play. Like most librarians, I emphasize the importance of evaluation in my information-literacy instruction, but at this point, I worry that I don’t know enough about data to help a student or colleague evaluate or manage it. The advantage of working in a small university is that my department can be somewhat of a one-stop shop for scholarship support, but the downside is that I don\'t have the level of in-depth expertise or experience in each role that my students and faculty might need. For example, as much as I’d like to help my chemistry faculty with their data, I feel like a librarian specializing in chemistry would have a much better understanding of their data-management needs and options.\r\n<blockquote>L: Many people share your concern, but I think the skills and perspective that you and other library and archives experts would bring to the data table would be so valuable. For instance, from a collection-development point of view, the data community could benefit from lessons learned about crafting collection-development policies and keeping them up to date over time. Evaluating data quality is immensely difficult, but a great place to start might be to look at the factors you use to judge quality for collection materials. Deaccessioning is a relatively new but important conversation in the data community. Understanding the value and mechanics of a catalog, and of multiple levels of metadata, is a really valuable skill in the data world as well. We are working on data search and access, and are running into the issues of systems not playing nicely together, differing metadata, and issues with access policies, just like in the library realm. Conversations with researchers about data end up sounding a whole lot like reference interviews. I don’t at all think that you need to have “data” in your title to be qualified to be part of the data discussion. There is so much you and others can add just based on your knowledge of the conceptual and practical LIS realms. The work of data curation is relatively new, I hope we can take the best of all of the information fields and create something even better.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>What\'s Next?</strong>\r\n\r\nK: One of the hardest things about my job is persuading stakeholders to fund and support digital projects with long-term rather than immediate benefits. There are so many competing demands on institutional resources, and the complexity and uncertainty of digital preservation makes it hard for me to articulate how investing time and money now will help us down the road. How do we convince people to value what we do?\r\n<blockquote>L: That is certainly the question for the ages! I think there are big cultural, economic, and political issues that need to be addressed, but that doesn’t mean we should wait around for a societal green light. If we had limitless funds, are we all clear on what we would create? I think that getting our own house in order is a good place to start. Let’s define and clearly articulate our evolving roles, and recognize contributions and potential relationships within our communities and in related groups. I think we still have a ways to go to know how to integrate more with our communities and promote our own value, but this is a learning process, a research process.</blockquote>\r\nK: Char Booth wrote a while back that the “outsider” perspective is one of the most important things librarians bring to the scholarly table. ((Char Booth, “Librarians as  __________: Shapeshifting at the Periphery,” <i>In the Library with the Lead Pipe</i>, July 21, 2010, http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/.)) Our neutrality and distance adds an important perspective to specialized research.\r\n<blockquote>L: The LIS community is not really neutral, though. We’re representing future generations of scholars; essentially, we are arguing for the greater good. The whole of scholarly knowledge is greater than the sum of its individual researcher parts, and we’re the ones trying to bring the pieces together.</blockquote>\r\nKristen and Lynn:\r\n\r\n<em>This conversation on the relationships between libraries, archives, and data curation is still in its early stages. Many of our questions need deeper exploration, and there are many topics (social media, versioning, identifier schemes, repository certification, branding, sustainability, scaling, and more) that we haven’t tackled here. Most importantly, we know there are issues, perspectives, and opportunities outside our areas of expertise (such as data curation in the humanities) that should be brought into the discussion. Far from having the last word, then, we hope instead that we\'ve given all of our librarian, archivist, and data colleagues some common ground from which to kick off your own conversations—we’ll save you a seat at the dinner table!</em>','All in the Family: A Dinner Table Conversation about Libraries, Archives, Data, and Science','','inherit','open','open','','4831-revision-6','','','2013-06-27 19:39:47','2013-06-27 19:39:47','',4831,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4831-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4940,3,'2013-06-27 19:41:20','2013-06-27 19:41:20','<b>Abstract</b>\r\n\r\nIncreased interest in large-scale, publicly accessible data collections has made data curation critical to the management, preservation, and improvement of research data in the social and natural sciences, as well as the humanities. This paper explicates an approach to data curation education that integrates traditional notions of curation with principles and expertise from library, archival, and computer science. We begin by tracing the emergence of data curation as both a concept and a field of practice related to, but distinct from, both digital curation and data stewardship. This historical account, while far from definitive, considers perspectives from both the sciences and the humanities. Alongside traditional LIS and archival science practices, unique aspects of curation have informed our concept of “purposeful work” with data and, in turn, our pedagogical approach to data curation for the sciences and the humanities.\r\n\r\n<b>The Genesis of <i>Data Curation</i></b>\r\n\r\nNatural history museums have long been devoted to the curation of scientific data in the form of physical specimens. Their curatorial roles and responsibilities help explain how the term <i>curation</i> came to stand for the current conception of the management and preservation of digital research data. Moreover, their focus on making data usable for research over the long term is tightly aligned with our approach to data curation education, to be discussed below, which has been driven by the principle of “purposeful curation.” ((Carole Palmer, Allen Renear, and Melissa Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data,” <i>Proceedings of the 4th International Digital Curation Conference, </i>2008.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn1\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nBefore scholarly practices shifted to a digital realm or a big data paradigm, natural history museums were extending their concept of curation in anticipation of the demand for the management and enhancement of digital data. In particular, William Fry, a curator at the British Museum of Natural History, made very early observations about the need to optimize data collections for research in a digital environment. His 1965 <i>Nature </i>article, “Methods in Taxonomy,” asserts, “what is urgently needed, if numerical taxonomy is to become an accepted tool of routine identification and classification, is proof that the labour of collecting the vast quantities of data required for the statistics is rewarded by greatly increased usefulness of the results.” ((William G. Fry, “Methods in Taxonomy,” <i>Nature</i> 207 (1965): 246, doi:10.1038/207245a0.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn2\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nFry questioned how “mathematical and computational” methods would affect the practices of curators and collection managers, forecasting the kinds of concerns we hear today about the data deluge: “While collections, the items of which can be counted in hundreds, can be adequately controlled and used by means of written guides and indices, these time-honoured methods cannot be efficient where collections must be numbered in tens or hundreds of thousands.” ((Ibid.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn3\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nThe notion of <i>curation</i> in relation to digital research data became more common in the 1990s, although most of what we now think of as <i>data curation </i>was often labeled <i>informatics </i>in both the humanities and the sciences. A 1994 Department of Energy (DOE) report on genome informatics is notable in its attention to data access and management, as well as its description of “database curators” in both laboratories and natural history museums. However, the first published application of the term <i>data curation</i> may be found in Diane Zorich’s 1995 paper on future collections management in <i>Museum Management and Curatorship</i>. She elaborates on the concept of database curators from the 1994 DOE report, arguing for an entirely new field of information work in museums, libraries, and traditional scientific laboratory settings:\r\n<blockquote>Data sets need to be examined for consistency, long-term quality and relevance over time, and new sources of data must be identified and assessed. Changes or updates to data require authentication and verification. Tools which support object databases, such as authority lists, thesauri, data dictionaries and other documentation resources, need to be maintained, updated and distributed at regular intervals, while data security and access must be considered. All these concerns constitute the discipline of data curation. ((Diane M. Zorich, \"Data management: Managing electronic information: Data curation in museums,\" <i>Museum Management and Curatorship</i> 14, no. 4 (1995): 431.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn4\">\r\n</a></blockquote>\r\nIn the humanities and cultural heritage communities, the curation of digital research data has been an important topic since at least the late 1980s. Again, the museum community, especially those engaged with the early web, was at the center of curation discourse. In 1987, in the first issue of <i>Archival Informatics Newsletter</i> (the external house organ for David Bearman’s company), Bearman explicitly drew the link between informatics as “an emerging usage in biomedicine” and “a philosophy of looking at the cultural information missions of archives and museums.” ((David Bearman, “What Are/Is Informatics?” <i>Archival Informatics Newsletter</i> (1987): 8.)) In 1993, the second International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM) featured a paper by Susan Hockey, then Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) at Rutgers and Princeton Universities, reporting on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard for machine-readable texts initiated that year. Hockey explains the significance of efforts like the TEI to the goals of those working on “museum documentation and information handling systems,” in part because of the need for “the usefulness, development and longevity of . . . data.” ((Susan Hockey, “Developing Text Standards,” <i>Selected papers from the second International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, Cambridge, England</i> (1993): 255, <a href=\"http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim93/hockey.pdf\">http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim93/hockey.pdf</a>.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn6\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nIn the same year that Zorich’s article coined the term “data curation,” the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) ((Jisc, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus.aspx.)) in the UK helped to establish the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), with the following mission: it “acquires, curates, preserves and provides access to complex digital resources created by or supporting research and teaching in Higher and Further Education and life-long learning.” ((“Interview with Sheila Anderson and Hamish James, AHDS,” <i>Digital Curation Center</i>, accessed May 28, 2013, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/community/interviews/sheila-anderson-and-hamish-james.)) Shortly thereafter the aims of the AHDS were further refined to “collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from scholarly research in the humanities” and to further “develop a generalized and extensible framework for digital resource creation, description, preservation, and location.” ((Daniel Greenstein, “Serving the Arts and Humanities” <i>Ariadne 4</i> (1996), http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/ahds.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn9\">\r\n</a><b></b>\r\n\r\n<b>Diffuse Trajectory in the Humanities</b>\r\n\r\nInitiatives in the humanities, such as the AHDS, were undoubtedly responding to data-curation imperatives similar to those in bioinformatics and other sciences. Clear parallels are the exception, however, in a longer and more discontinuous and diffuse trajectory as the <i>digital humanities</i> progressed. Through 2001, digital research in the humanities was sometimes referred to as humanities informatics, ((J. Unsworth, “A Master’s Degree in Digital Humanities: Part of the Media Studies Program at the University of Virginia,” <i>Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Université Laval, Québec, Canada</i>, 2001,<i> </i><a href=\"http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/laval.html\">http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/laval.html</a>; M. G. Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” <i>ADE Bulletin</i> 150 (2010): 1-7.)) but <i>humanities computing </i>became the more common term for the growing field now known as digital humanities.\r\n\r\nSeveral significant strands of early computational research in humanities computing involved the development of indices, annotated linguistic corpora, and digitally encoded texts—in other words, the preparation, collection, organization, and maintenance of datasets. The widely accepted origin story of the digital humanities as a field centers on Father Roberto Busa’s project, beginning in 1949, to create a concordance to the complete works of Thomas Aquinas. ((Susan Hockey, \"The history of humanities computing,\" <i>A companion to digital humanities</i> (2004): 3-19.)) Busa’s reflection on the genesis of his own work contains an echo of Fry’s call for a curatorial response to “mathematical and computational” methods—with the challenge being the accelerated production of textual data rather than biological specimens. As Busa states, it was clear “that to process texts containing more than ten million words, I had to look for some machinery.” ((Roberto Busa, \"The annals of humanities computing: The index thomisticus,\" <i>Computers and the Humanities</i> 14, no. 2 (1980): 83.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn12\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nTwo decades of work in concordance and index building followed from Busa’s initial achievement, as documented by Dolores M. Burton, ((Cited in Hockey, \"The History of Humanities Computing.”)) and a cognate track of scholarship was devoted to digital dictionaries and corpora, or “electronic lexicography.” ((Harry M. Logan, \"Electronic lexicography,\" <i>Computers and the Humanities</i> 25, no. 6 (1991): 351-61)) Databases became important in the 1980s and 1990s, evidenced by the 1992 inaugural CETH seminar devoted to a project on “Building a Humanities Database.” ((Hockey, Susan. 1992. Humanist 5.0632 CETH Inaugural Seminar 1/17. Retrieved from <a href=\"http://dhhumanist.org/Archives/Virginia/v05/0621.html\">http://dhhumanist.org/Archives/Virginia/v05/0621.html</a>.)) Although less pronounced than with genomics or the natural museum community, the value of databases and their many applications to scholarship were beginning to be recognized.\r\n\r\nCompared to the science realm where curation activities generally remained distinct from research, humanities computing encompassed work with data that was curatorial in nature. The focus of the research community, however, tended toward information retrieval, processing, and publishing more than data curation, even with the earliest case, when Busa referred to the need “to process” data for the Aquinas concordance. There was no comparable modern tradition of stewardship or collection management as with natural history museums. Thus, humanists did not adopt the terminological framework of curation for their work with data. Instead, they applied vocabulary familiar from philology, textual editing, quantitative history, and linguistics. In digital literary studies, the development of methods for digitally encoding textual variants, for example, demonstrates an engagement with curatorial concerns such as provenance but using discipline-specific terms like “diplomatic” transcription strategies, and “editions.” ((For an interesting post hoc alignment, see Allen H. Renear, Molly Dolan, Kevin Trainor, and Melissa H. Cragin, \"Towards a cross‐disciplinary notion of data level in data curation,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 46, no. 1 (2009): 1-8.)) Many of the debates over findings from quantitative history related to the sufficiency or insufficiency of information collections created by scholars pursuing those analyses and to ideas of historical “evidence.” ((William Thomas, \"Computing and the historical imagination,\" <i>A companion to digital humanities</i> (2004): 56-68.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn17\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nWhile the principles and many processes involved in data curation are common across the science and humanities, there are still important differences in how and when curation work is integrated into, or provided as, a service for research. As with other areas of digital scholarship, flagship initiatives are often harbingers of future trends. The highly visible AHDS lost funding in 2008. Since that time, data curation in the humanities returned to being a more diffuse, <i>ad hoc</i> enterprise rather than a part of governmental and institutional research programs, as is more typical in the sciences. ((Tobias Blanke, Mark Hedges, and Stuart Dunn, \"Arts and humanities e-science—Current practices and future challenges,\" <i>Future Generation Computer Systems</i> 25, no. 4 (2009): 474-80.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn18\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Continuity in the Sciences</b>\r\n\r\nThe 2002 paper, “Online Scientific Data Curation, Publication, and Archiving,” by computer scientist Jim Gray and collaborators was instrumental in projecting the term data curation beyond the museum and bioinformatics domains. Gray and his colleagues were developing architecture and storage environments for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in astronomy, and they had also begun writing about a new paradigm of scientific research associated with the emergence of grid computing and a deluge of digital data. ((Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen, \"e-Science and its implications,\" <i>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences</i> 361, no. 1809 (2003): 1809-1825.)) The “fourth paradigm” referred to a new data-driven method for scientific inquiry, where analysis of expertly curated, open access data collections would complement and extend traditional methods like simulation, observation, and theoretical experimentation. ((Jim Gray, Alexander S. Szalay, Ani R. Thakar, Christopher Stoughton, and Jan Vandenberg, \"Online scientific data curation, publication, and archiving,\" <i>Proceedings of SPIE</i> (2002): 103-107; Jim Gray, David T. Liu, Maria Nieto-Santisteban, Alex Szalay, David J. DeWitt, and Gerd Heber, \"Scientific data management in the coming decade,\" <i>ACM SIGMOD Record</i> 34, no. 4 (2005) 34-41; Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Michele Tolle, eds.<i> The fourth paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery</i> (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Research, 2009).)) Data curation, central to this vision, was described as the annotation, preservation, and expert description of datasets, to be carried out, by and large, by librarians. ((Gray et al., \"Online scientific data curation, publication, and archiving.\"))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn21\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nAt the same time, the UK was embracing the potential digital transformation of a national research agenda. What had been called an informatics approach in North America and continental Europe was being labeled <i>eResearch </i>and <i>eScience </i>in the UK. ((Paulien Hogeweg, \"The roots of bioinformatics in theoretical biology,\" <i>PLoS computational biology</i> 7, no. 3 (2011): e1002021.)) A 2003 Jisc-commissioned report on the infrastructures needed to support eScience was one of the first attempts to clarify differences between preservation, archiving, and curation in relation to digital scholarship. ((Philip Lord and Alison Macdonald, <i>e-Science Curation Report: Data curation for e-Science in the UK: an audit to establish requirements for future curation and provision</i> (Digital Archiving Consultancy Limited, 2003).)) The report identifies data curation<i> </i>as the “activity of, managing and promoting the use of data from its point of creation, to ensure it is fit for contemporary purpose, and available for discovery and re-use.” It specifies that “archiving” is needed for “curation,” and “preservation”<i> </i>is “an aspect of archiving,” with all three “involved in managing change over time.” ((Ibid., 12.)) To this day, the distinctions and applications of these three concepts remain imprecise, as is also the case with the terms <i>digital curation</i>, <i>data curation</i>, and <i>data stewardship. </i>In the next section we clarify some of the differences between these terms, their use, and the overall importance in understanding the unique contribution of data curation to science and scholarship.\r\n\r\n<b>Co-Evolution of Digital Curation and Data Curation</b>\r\n\r\nIn the UK, the term digital curation first appeared in a 2001 digital preservation workshop, ((Neil Beagrie, \"Digital curation for science, digital libraries, and individuals,” <i>International Journal of Digital Curation</i> 1 (2006), 3-16.)) but later Neal Beagrie more explicitly defined it in his description of the newly formed Digital Curation Centre (DCC):\r\n<blockquote>The term “digital curation” is increasingly being used for the actions needed to maintain digital research data and other digital materials over their entire lifecycle and over time for current and future generations of users. Implicit in this definition are the processes of digital archiving and digital preservation, but it also includes all the processes needed for good data creation and management, and the capacity to add value to data to generate new sources of information and knowledge. ((Neil Beagrie, “The Digital Curation Centre” <i>Learned Publishing</i> 17, no. 1 (2004): 7-9.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn26\">\r\n</a></blockquote>\r\nThis text is nearly an exact match with the roles outlined in the 2003 Jisc report on <i>data </i>curation—evidence that early on the two concepts were thought of synonymously. Other publications advancing the concept of curation in the UK applied the terms loosely for a number of years. For example, a publication formalizing many of the original 2003 Jisc report recommendations states: “data curation concerns the long-term management of data, from its initial collection to its deposition into an archive.” ((Philip Lord, Alison Macdonald, Liz Lyon, and David Giaretta, \"From data deluge to data curation,\" <i>Proc 3th UK e-Science All Hands Meeting</i> (2004): 371-75.)) The following year, digital curation was more “broadly interpreted” as being “about maintaining and adding value to, a trusted body of digital information for current and future use.” ((David Giaretta, “DCC approach to digital curation, version 1.23,” (white paper, 2005), http://dev.dcc.rl.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Main/DCCApproachToCuration.)) Summarizing many different uses and definitions of digital curation, Yakel’s definition of <i>digital curation</i> is explicit about its place within the information professions. She refers to it as “the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including the preservation, of digital data for future use.” ((Elizabeth Yakel, \"Digital curation,\" <i>OCLC Systems &amp; Services</i> 23, no. 4 (2007): 335-340.))\r\n\r\nYakel’s publication came out the same year that we offered a definition of data curation for the Data Curation Education Program (DCEP), funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The DCEP definition states that data curation is “the active and ongoing management of data throughout its entire lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship.” ((Melissa H. Cragin, P. Bryan Heidorn, Carole L. Palmer, and Linda C. Smith, \"An educational program on data curation,\" <i>American Library Association Conference, Science and Technology Section, </i>Washington, D.C., June 25, 2007. <a href=\"http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3493\">http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3493</a>)) This definition guided development of the Specialization in Data Curation in the GSLIS master’s program and has been applied consistently in DCEP initiatives across the sciences and the humanities, including an annual Summer Institute on Data Curation. The distinction between this definition and those of digital curation is subtle, but important. The focus of data curation is on the “interest and usefulness” of data to scholarship, and this emphasizes the traditional mission of research libraries to provide information to support research and the production of new knowledge.\r\n\r\nDigital curation is, or has become, a term that better accommodates a broader range of digital material. It does not indicate what is being curated nor does it necessarily imply which communities can be purposefully served by curatorial activities. Data curation, on the other hand, relates directly to data that is produced and used by scholarly communities, and it facilitates the reuse and repurposing of data to meet new research needs. As Renear and Muñoz aptly explained in the introduction to a DCEP workshop held at the annual Digital Humanities conference, “Data curation addresses the challenge of maintaining digital information that is produced in the course of research in a manner that preserves its meaning and usefulness as a potential input for further research.” ((Trevor Muñoz and Allen Renear, “Issues in Digital Humanities Data Curation,” (white paper, 2011), http://hdl.handle.net/2142/30852).)) Their emphasis, echoing Cragin et al., is on the scholarship and research enabled by the effective curation of digital data resources. ((Cragin et al., \"An educational program on data curation.\"))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn32\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nAlthough far from complete, this account of the concept of curation provides important contextual background for the next section, where we discuss DCEP’s pedagogical approach to data curation education. As noted above, the principle of “purposeful curation” has been the guiding concept for DCEP and the Specialization in Data Curation. This area focuses exclusively on the curation of research data for scholarly and scientific communities, covering the complex theoretical and practical problems that span eScience and digital humanities.\r\n\r\n<b>Purposeful Work with Data: Beyond Stewardship</b>\r\n\r\nThe “purposeful curation” concept guiding local educational efforts was more formally articulated in response to a paper that asserted, “library science has not demonstrated that it has the theoretical foundations and knowledge base that are capable of providing the framework for handling digital entities.” ((Seamus Ross, \"Digital preservation, archival science and methodological foundations for digital libraries,\" <i>New Review of Information Networking</i> 17, no. 1 (2012): 43-68.)) We argued the contrary: Because of its commitment to the “needs of users to access and use information of value over the long term,” library and information science (LIS) is uniquely positioned to provide the kind of foundation needed for systems and services to manage digital content, especially research data. ((Palmer, Renear, and Cragin, “Purposeful Curation.”)) Further, we explained that our aim in educating data curators was not only to prepare them to build and maintain data collections but also to be responsible for the “associated indexing systems, metadata standards, ontologies, and retrieval systems” that will make it possible for research data to work in concert with existing digital libraries, archives, and repositories. Data curation efforts that embrace this orientation to user communities and their needs within and across disciplines will be equipped to enable innovative research in the sciences and humanities with curated data for “experiments in scientific laboratories, the interpretation of texts by scholars in special collections, the development of exhibits in museums, and other purposeful work with data over time.” ((Ibid.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn35\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nThis conception of curation goes beyond the roles Zorich originally envisioned, ((Zorich, \"Data management.”)) attending to data quality, authentication, security, and associated documentation and tools. It is markedly more active and extends beyond assuring reliable data access, to adding value to support and advance research capabilities. The alignment with the research process is the primary feature that distinguishes data curation from data stewardship. Data stewardship is about management of a shared resource, often embodied by one person or a designated group. ((Karen S. Baker and Lynn Yarmey, \"Data stewardship: Environmental data curation and a web-of-repositories,\" <i>International Journal of Digital Curation</i> 4, no. 2 (2009): 12-27.)) It is clearly essential to the preservation and persistence of robust data collections, but it is a function of “managing data” that implies a less active, fixed maintenance of data over time. ((Cliff Jacobs and Steven J. Worley, “Data Curation in Climate and Weather: Transforming Our Ability to Improve Predictions through Global Knowledge Sharing,” <i>The International Journal of Digital Curation</i> (2009).)) Curation, on the other hand, is concerned with availability <i>and </i>future use of data, including the enhancement, extension, and improvement of data products for reuse beyond a single scholarly community.\r\n\r\nAt the same time, it is essential to recognize that the locally developed processes of data management and stewardship within specific communities are valuable sources of practical knowledge and current practice. The specialization needs to be applicable across domains, and the rate of change in research with digital data is a continual challenge for integrating best practices into the curriculum. Case studies on data management, processing, enhancement, and sharing in scientific and humanities domains have proven to be some of the best material for teaching applied aspects of data curation. Likewise, for repository-based data curation expertise, we depend on our partnerships with national data centers and data services operations in research libraries for coverage of state-of-the-art practices. Increasingly these partners are also serving as hosts for internships and other field experiences for students to work alongside more experienced curators.\r\n\r\n<b>Foundations of Curation</b>\r\n\r\nThe core of the curriculum is a single foundational course grounded in concepts and functions that underpin the curation of research data in practice. The course draws on principles from both LIS and archival science, as well as current trends and practice within research domains and professional work in data repositories. Of the six areas within the core, three are fairly common to information management systems, especially when dealing with digital content: interoperable technical infrastructure, policy development, and intellectual property. The remaining three areas are more closely aligned with key dimensions of LIS expertise and are central to the “purposeful curation” concept: user communities and their information behavior; collection development, management, and research services; and information organization and representation.\r\n\r\nIn the data curation curriculum these dimensions are further refined in relation to problems and practices around research data. The user dimension emphasizes <i>research cultures</i><b> </b>that impact practices of data production and sharing within the system of scholarly communication; the <i>collections</i><b> </b>dimension emphasizes heterogeneous, complex data resources and their potential for reuse across the lifecycle of data, informed by key aspects of archival science; and the <i>representation</i><b> </b>dimension emphasizes the formal characteristics of information objects that carry digital data—with a particular focus on issues of identity, ontology development, and provenance. It is important to note that these dimensions cut across some of the basic areas of knowledge and skills for data curation, such as metadata. That is, while metadata activities are generally associated with representation, effective application of metadata will adequately document aspects of research cultures related to data-collection methods. High-functioning metadata will also be guided by collection issues related to granularity of description, properties of aggregate data products, and meaningful groupings of data for discovery and integration.\r\n\r\n<i>Research cultures: data production, data sharing, and scholarly communication</i>\r\n\r\nThe curation of research data needs to be informed by a detailed understanding of how data are produced and used in conducting research and how these processes fit into the larger context of scholarly communication. As is true with information behavior more generally, data practices vary in important ways across disciplines and sub-disciplines. For example, while there are a number of successful, large-scale open data initiatives, with the Protein Data Bank and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as canonical cases, they are the exception rather than the rule.\r\n\r\nWhile data curation is largely concerned with how data sharing within and across research communities can advance science and scholarship, most researchers do not make their data publically available and most research communities have yet to develop a culture of data sharing. ((Christine L. Borgman, \"The conundrum of sharing research data.\" <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 63, no. 6 (2012): 1059-1078; Anne E. Thessen and David J. Patterson, \"Data issues in the life sciences,\" <i>ZooKeys</i> 150 (2011): 15; Carol Tenopir, Suzie Allard, Kimberly L. Douglass, Arsev Umur Aydinoglu, Lei Wu, Eleanor Read, Maribeth Manoff, and Mike Frame, \"Data sharing by scientists: practices and perceptions,\" <i>PLoS One</i> 6, no. 6 (2011).)) If researchers are willing to share data, the form in which they are willing to release them may provide an easy preservation target, but it may not have the most value for long-term reuse. ((Melissa H. Cragin, Carole L. Palmer, Jacob R. Carlson, and Michael Witt, \"Data sharing, small science and institutional repositories,\" <i>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences</i> 368, no. 1926 (2010): 4023-4038.)) Moreover, actual reuse can be highly dependent on rich contextual metadata provided by data producers. ((Matthew S. Mayernik, Jillian C. Wallis, and Christine L. Borgman, \"Unearthing the infrastructure: Humans and sensors in field-based scientific research,\" <i>Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work</i> (2012); Nicholas M. Weber, Karen S. Baker, Andrea K. Thomer, Tiffany C. Chao, and Carole L. Palmer, \"Value and context in data use: Domain analysis revisited,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1-10; Laura A. Wynholds, Christine L. Borgman,  Jillian C. Wallis, Ashley Sands, and Sharon Traweek, \"Data, Data Use, and Scientific Inquiry: Two Case Studies of Data Practices,\" <i>ACM Press</i> (2012): 19.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nData curation is part of the more global context of scholarly communication in which research libraries, publishers, and scholars have always been the primary actors and stakeholders. As would be expected in this tradition, much attention has been focused on the data associated with specific journals or published papers. To date, there have been a few successful approaches in the “journal—underlying data” archiving model. ((For example, Michael C. Whitlock, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, and Allen J. Moore, \"Data archiving,\" <i>The American Naturalist</i> 175, no. 2 (2010): 145-46.)) However, some of the most challenging curation problems and, arguably, the greatest opportunities lie in our ability to make more basic research data available and interoperable across fields. ((Hanisch, Robert, and Sayeed Choudhury, \"The Data Conservancy: Building a Sustainable System for Interdisciplinary Scientific Data Curation and Preservation,\" <i>Proceedings of the PV 2009 conference, European Space Agency</i> (2009).)) Therefore, data curators should be trained and organizationally positioned to assess accurately which data collections are of value, and in which combinations and states other scholars would find them most useful. Data curators should be able to identify data that have high priority for both their immediate service community and broader domains of interest. This is a unique set of roles and responsibilities for the field of LIS, and it requires educated professionals who understand relationships among research areas and the potential affordances of data for new applications.\r\n\r\n<i>Collections: heterogeneous data, lifecycles, and archives</i>\r\n\r\nCollections have always been central to librarianship and archival science, and their importance will continue as the stores of data grow and become increasingly searchable and browsable. They will be essential units for planning and implementing curation objectives and resources, for supporting research communities, and supporting the reuse and repurposing of data. Variations on the traditional processes of selection, appraisal, and collection management are particularly relevant. ((Angus Whyte and Andrew Wilson, <i>How to Appraise &amp; Select Research Data for Curation</i>, Digital Curation Centre, 2010, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/appraise- select-research-data.)) At various scales, from big data-driven research to smaller data-intensive research, collections have significant properties that provide intellectual, social, and organizational structures for meaningful work with data. ((Carole L. Palmer, Oksana L. Zavalina, and Katrina Fenlon, \"Beyond size and search: Building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 47, no. 1 (2010): 1-10.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nCollections have life cycles of usefulness to scholarship that need to be regulated through curation, including maintenance, migration, and preservation, over time. Moreover, “collection development and collection description are formative curation activities that add value for scholarly inquiry at both the collection and [larger] aggregation levels.” ((Katrina Fenlon, Jacob Jett, and Carole L. Palmer, \"Digital Collections and Aggregations,\" <i>DHCuration Guide</i> (2011), http://guide.dhcuration.org/collections/; Carole Palmer, “Scholarly work and the shaping of digital access,” <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 56, no. 11 (2005).)) As the data accessible in digital environments continue to increase at a rapid pace, sound collection development and description will be essential to presenting data for exploration and discovery. In conjunction with searching capabilities, researchers will greatly benefit from the ability to browse dense and cohesive layers of data sources that not only anticipate researchers’ known needs, but also allow them to effectively navigate through and interpret extensive bodies of openly accessible data.\r\n\r\nCollections will increasingly need to be organized within local institutional repositories and disciplinary data repositories as researchers submit data to comply with funding-agency requirements for data-management planning and data sharing. Curators will be involved as advisors and collaborators in data-management planning, for which knowledge of collections will be key. They will need to identify which versions to retain and share; align with institutional aims and capacity for preservation and access options; assess the fitness of data for deposit in domain or consortia repositories; and advise on intellectual property issues that researchers will face in attempting to comply with these mandates.\r\n\r\nMore generally, collections will be vital to providing reliable access and preservation to data products. Over the long term, we risk ending up with data dumps rather than functional libraries of relevant and usable data assets if we ignore the art of building and organizing data collections for research communities.\r\n\r\n<i>Representation: identity, ontologies, and provenance</i>\r\n\r\nRigorous conceptual analysis of core curatorial notions such as representation, identity, authenticity, reference, and provenance is a distinctive aspect of the DCEP approach to data curation education. Although stewardship requires verifying bit sequences and ensuring that files have not been corrupted, many curation problems turn on much more challenging issues, such as whether two files contain the same data even though they use different representation languages, encodings, or formats. A comparison of bit sequences will provide no assistance here, and so is inadequate for curation that goes beyond stewardship. What is needed is a terminological framework that clarifies these issues, as well as techniques for documentation and confirmation. Getting full value from cyberinfrastructure and computational systems requires that curators be able to refine formal terminology and document the “interpretive frames” that connect reasoning across levels of abstraction. ((David Dubin, Karen Wickett, and Simone Sacchi, “Content, Format, and Interpretation,” <i>Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011</i>. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies 7 (2011), doi:10.4242/BalisageVol7.Dubin01.)) Similarly, precisely documenting the derivation of one dataset from another, critical for both scientific and humanities scholarship, also requires sophisticated conceptual frameworks, tools, and practices. To support curatorial education we are therefore developing general frameworks of concepts and terminology that can be used across disciplines. ((Renear et al., \"Towards a cross‐disciplinary notion of data level in data curation\"; Simone Sacchi, Karen Wickett, Allen Renear, and David Dubin, \"A framework for applying the concept of significant properties to datasets,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 48, no. 1 (2011): 1-10; Karen M. Wickett, Simone Sacchi, David Dubin, and Allen H. Renear, \"Identifying Content and Levels of Representation in Scientific Data,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1-10.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nA solid familiarity with semantic technologies (such as the Resource Description Framework [RDF] and the Web Ontology Language [OWL]) is increasingly important as structured terminologies and ontologies for representing scientific and cultural information are now widely used. These data organization strategies are fundamental to data curation: they help ensure that data remains meaningful; they improve software interoperability and data integration; and they support unanticipated use, as well as the mobilization of interdisciplinary approaches. Finally, even the distinctions between publication and data, and reading and analysis, are blurring; new tools are both responding to and driving changes in scholarly publishing and how researchers search, filter, scan, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content from the literature. ((Allen H. Renear and Carole L. Palmer, \"Strategic reading, ontologies, and the future of scientific publishing,\" <i>Science</i> 325, no. 5942 (2009): 828-32.)) For data curators there is no escape from engaging these fundamental issues of representation, identity, ontologies, and provenance.\r\n\r\n<b>Curation Professionals in the Workforce</b>\r\n\r\nA recent analysis of job placements for students completing the Specialization of Data Curation in the GSLIS master’s program at Illinois has been instructive for understanding the types of organizations and positions that need data professionals. The discourse in the field has emphasized that data curation expertise will need to permeate the research process at large, with curation beginning at the initial planning stages of a research project, followed by long-term data management and providing open access data for public use. ((Nicholas M. Weber, Carole L. Palmer, and Tiffany C. Chao, \"Current Trends and Future Directions in Data Curation Research and Education,\" <i>Journal of Web Librarianship</i> 6, no. 4 (2012): 305-20.)) Interestingly, our placement data show that curation professionals are filling positions in many types of organizations in roles that will, in fact, have an impact throughout the life cycle of data in the research enterprise.\r\n\r\nOf the fifty-five graduates to date, we have been able to track placement of forty-nine individuals. Thirty-three percent have taken positions in research libraries and museums. A good number of these graduates have gone to academic libraries, but some are working in national libraries, special libraries, large art museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. Twenty percent have gone to research centers, including national data centers and digital humanities and scientific research institutes, where they are more directly involved with the research applications and curation of data. Another twenty percent are in the corporate sector, which needs high-functioning data to gain competitive market advantage, but in these settings curation skills are also being blended with statistical competencies that have more traditionally been labeled as data science. The nearly fifty position titles also show how curation positions are being formalized; they range from data curator, data-management consultant, research data librarian, and digital preservation librarian to data analyst, digital asset manager, and information architect.\r\n\r\nThrough our experience with the DCEP program, the benefits of internships and practicum in data centers became evident, and field experiences are now a priority in our next phases of program development. The Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) initiative, funded by IMLS, has been a major step in building a model for integrating field experiences into MA and PhD programs through a partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a long-standing international leader in scientific data infrastructure and services. The DCERC collaboration includes the University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences, whose participating masters students complete the Foundations of Data Curation course at Illinois.\r\n\r\nThe NCAR internships, piloted with Illinois doctoral students and Tennessee masters students, have been explicitly designed to mentor students in both data management and the scientific research contexts. It is our belief that apprenticeships need to involve students directly in best practices at mature data centers and expose them to the actual data problems that active researchers experience; this will prepare them adequately to excel at curation in data-intensive research environments.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nThis paper provided an overview of our approach to data curation education. It is important to note that this approach has been greatly influenced, both formally and informally, by our many collaborators and colleagues working to improve data access and research capabilities for scholarship in both the sciences and humanities. Our “purposeful curation” perspective is not meant to be comparative to other curation programs or an exhaustive, fully articulated pedagogy. However, we do feel that our student placement data, especially the high number of graduates placed across different types of research organizations, is solid evidence for the success of this particular approach.\r\n\r\nThe historical overview presented at the beginning of the paper gave an account of the concepts and definitions related to data curation based on the literature encountered through our work on the DCEP and DCERC initiatives, as both seasoned and new LIS educators and researchers. So, while we have identified a number of landmarks and trends in the conception of data curation to date, much of the story is still to be traced, interpreted, and retold. We hope that this initial effort will encourage additions, corrections, and amendments to the history of the field, and in turn lead to better sharing of both seasoned and new pedagogical approaches to what may prove to be an important turning point for the information professions.\r\n<div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div></div>\r\n</div>','Foundations of Data Curation: The Pedagogy and Practice of “Purposeful Work” with Research Data','','inherit','open','open','','4819-revision-8','','','2013-06-27 19:41:20','2013-06-27 19:41:20','',4819,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4819-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(4941,3,'2013-06-28 19:40:44','2013-06-28 19:40:44','<b>Abstract</b>\r\n\r\nIncreased interest in large-scale, publicly accessible data collections has made data curation critical to the management, preservation, and improvement of research data in the social and natural sciences, as well as the humanities. This paper explicates an approach to data curation education that integrates traditional notions of curation with principles and expertise from library, archival, and computer science. We begin by tracing the emergence of data curation as both a concept and a field of practice related to, but distinct from, both digital curation and data stewardship. This historical account, while far from definitive, considers perspectives from both the sciences and the humanities. Alongside traditional LIS and archival science practices, unique aspects of curation have informed our concept of “purposeful work” with data and, in turn, our pedagogical approach to data curation for the sciences and the humanities.\r\n\r\n<b>The Genesis of <i>Data Curation</i></b>\r\n\r\nNatural history museums have long been devoted to the curation of scientific data in the form of physical specimens. Their curatorial roles and responsibilities help explain how the term <i>curation</i> came to stand for the current conception of the management and preservation of digital research data. Moreover, their focus on making data usable for research over the long term is tightly aligned with our approach to data curation education, to be discussed below, which has been driven by the principle of “purposeful curation.” ((Carole Palmer, Allen Renear, and Melissa Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data,” <i>Proceedings of the 4th International Digital Curation Conference, </i>2008.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn1\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nBefore scholarly practices shifted to a digital realm or a big data paradigm, natural history museums were extending their concept of curation in anticipation of the demand for the management and enhancement of digital data. In particular, William Fry, a curator at the British Museum of Natural History, made very early observations about the need to optimize data collections for research in a digital environment. His 1965 <i>Nature </i>article, “Methods in Taxonomy,” asserts, “what is urgently needed, if numerical taxonomy is to become an accepted tool of routine identification and classification, is proof that the labour of collecting the vast quantities of data required for the statistics is rewarded by greatly increased usefulness of the results.” ((William G. Fry, “Methods in Taxonomy,” <i>Nature</i> 207 (1965): 246, doi:10.1038/207245a0.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn2\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nFry questioned how “mathematical and computational” methods would affect the practices of curators and collection managers, forecasting the kinds of concerns we hear today about the data deluge: “While collections, the items of which can be counted in hundreds, can be adequately controlled and used by means of written guides and indices, these time-honoured methods cannot be efficient where collections must be numbered in tens or hundreds of thousands.” ((Ibid.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn3\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nThe notion of <i>curation</i> in relation to digital research data became more common in the 1990s, although most of what we now think of as <i>data curation </i>was often labeled <i>informatics </i>in both the humanities and the sciences. A 1994 Department of Energy (DOE) report on genome informatics is notable in its attention to data access and management, as well as its description of “database curators” in both laboratories and natural history museums. However, the first published application of the term <i>data curation</i> may be found in Diane Zorich’s 1995 paper on future collections management in <i>Museum Management and Curatorship</i>. She elaborates on the concept of database curators from the 1994 DOE report, arguing for an entirely new field of information work in museums, libraries, and traditional scientific laboratory settings:\r\n<blockquote>Data sets need to be examined for consistency, long-term quality and relevance over time, and new sources of data must be identified and assessed. Changes or updates to data require authentication and verification. Tools which support object databases, such as authority lists, thesauri, data dictionaries and other documentation resources, need to be maintained, updated and distributed at regular intervals, while data security and access must be considered. All these concerns constitute the discipline of data curation. ((Diane M. Zorich, \"Data management: Managing electronic information: Data curation in museums,\" <i>Museum Management and Curatorship</i> 14, no. 4 (1995): 431.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn4\">\r\n</a></blockquote>\r\nIn the humanities and cultural heritage communities, the curation of digital research data has been an important topic since at least the late 1980s. Again, the museum community, especially those engaged with the early web, was at the center of curation discourse. In 1987, in the first issue of <i>Archival Informatics Newsletter</i> (the external house organ for David Bearman’s company), Bearman explicitly drew the link between informatics as “an emerging usage in biomedicine” and “a philosophy of looking at the cultural information missions of archives and museums.” ((David Bearman, “What Are/Is Informatics?” <i>Archival Informatics Newsletter</i> (1987): 8.)) In 1993, the second International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM) featured a paper by Susan Hockey, then Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) at Rutgers and Princeton Universities, reporting on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard for machine-readable texts initiated that year. Hockey explains the significance of efforts like the TEI to the goals of those working on “museum documentation and information handling systems,” in part because of the need for “the usefulness, development and longevity of . . . data.” ((Susan Hockey, “Developing Text Standards,” <i>Selected papers from the second International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, Cambridge, England</i> (1993): 255, <a href=\"http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim93/hockey.pdf\">http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim93/hockey.pdf</a>.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn6\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nIn the same year that Zorich’s article coined the term “data curation,” the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) ((Jisc, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus.aspx.)) in the UK helped to establish the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), with the following mission: it “acquires, curates, preserves and provides access to complex digital resources created by or supporting research and teaching in Higher and Further Education and life-long learning.” ((“Interview with Sheila Anderson and Hamish James, AHDS,” <i>Digital Curation Center</i>, accessed May 28, 2013, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/community/interviews/sheila-anderson-and-hamish-james.)) Shortly thereafter the aims of the AHDS were further refined to “collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from scholarly research in the humanities” and to further “develop a generalized and extensible framework for digital resource creation, description, preservation, and location.” ((Daniel Greenstein, “Serving the Arts and Humanities” <i>Ariadne 4</i> (1996), http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/ahds.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn9\">\r\n</a><b></b>\r\n\r\n<b>Diffuse Trajectory in the Humanities</b>\r\n\r\nInitiatives in the humanities, such as the AHDS, were undoubtedly responding to data-curation imperatives similar to those in bioinformatics and other sciences. Clear parallels are the exception, however, in a longer and more discontinuous and diffuse trajectory as the <i>digital humanities</i> progressed. Through 2001, digital research in the humanities was sometimes referred to as humanities informatics, ((J. Unsworth, “A Master’s Degree in Digital Humanities: Part of the Media Studies Program at the University of Virginia,” <i>Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Université Laval, Québec, Canada</i>, 2001,<i> </i><a href=\"http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/laval.html\">http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/laval.html</a>; M. G. Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” <i>ADE Bulletin</i> 150 (2010): 1-7.)) but <i>humanities computing </i>became the more common term for the growing field now known as digital humanities.\r\n\r\nSeveral significant strands of early computational research in humanities computing involved the development of indices, annotated linguistic corpora, and digitally encoded texts—in other words, the preparation, collection, organization, and maintenance of datasets. The widely accepted origin story of the digital humanities as a field centers on Father Roberto Busa’s project, beginning in 1949, to create a concordance to the complete works of Thomas Aquinas. ((Susan Hockey, \"The history of humanities computing,\" <i>A companion to digital humanities</i> (2004): 3-19.)) Busa’s reflection on the genesis of his own work contains an echo of Fry’s call for a curatorial response to “mathematical and computational” methods—with the challenge being the accelerated production of textual data rather than biological specimens. As Busa states, it was clear “that to process texts containing more than ten million words, I had to look for some machinery.” ((Roberto Busa, \"The annals of humanities computing: The index thomisticus,\" <i>Computers and the Humanities</i> 14, no. 2 (1980): 83.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn12\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nTwo decades of work in concordance and index building followed from Busa’s initial achievement, as documented by Dolores M. Burton, ((Cited in Hockey, \"The History of Humanities Computing.”)) and a cognate track of scholarship was devoted to digital dictionaries and corpora, or “electronic lexicography.” ((Harry M. Logan, \"Electronic lexicography,\" <i>Computers and the Humanities</i> 25, no. 6 (1991): 351-61)) Databases became important in the 1980s and 1990s, evidenced by the 1992 inaugural CETH seminar devoted to a project on “Building a Humanities Database.” ((Hockey, Susan. 1992. Humanist 5.0632 CETH Inaugural Seminar 1/17. Retrieved from <a href=\"http://dhhumanist.org/Archives/Virginia/v05/0621.html\">http://dhhumanist.org/Archives/Virginia/v05/0621.html</a>.)) Although less pronounced than with genomics or the natural museum community, the value of databases and their many applications to scholarship were beginning to be recognized.\r\n\r\nCompared to the science realm where curation activities generally remained distinct from research, humanities computing encompassed work with data that was curatorial in nature. The focus of the research community, however, tended toward information retrieval, processing, and publishing more than data curation, even with the earliest case, when Busa referred to the need “to process” data for the Aquinas concordance. There was no comparable modern tradition of stewardship or collection management as with natural history museums. Thus, humanists did not adopt the terminological framework of curation for their work with data. Instead, they applied vocabulary familiar from philology, textual editing, quantitative history, and linguistics. In digital literary studies, the development of methods for digitally encoding textual variants, for example, demonstrates an engagement with curatorial concerns such as provenance but using discipline-specific terms like “diplomatic” transcription strategies, and “editions.” ((For an interesting post hoc alignment, see Allen H. Renear, Molly Dolan, Kevin Trainor, and Melissa H. Cragin, \"Towards a cross‐disciplinary notion of data level in data curation,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 46, no. 1 (2009): 1-8.)) Many of the debates over findings from quantitative history related to the sufficiency or insufficiency of information collections created by scholars pursuing those analyses and to ideas of historical “evidence.” ((William Thomas, \"Computing and the historical imagination,\" <i>A companion to digital humanities</i> (2004): 56-68.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn17\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nWhile the principles and many processes involved in data curation are common across the science and humanities, there are still important differences in how and when curation work is integrated into, or provided as, a service for research. As with other areas of digital scholarship, flagship initiatives are often harbingers of future trends. The highly visible AHDS lost funding in 2008. Since that time, data curation in the humanities returned to being a more diffuse, <i>ad hoc</i> enterprise rather than a part of governmental and institutional research programs, as is more typical in the sciences. ((Tobias Blanke, Mark Hedges, and Stuart Dunn, \"Arts and humanities e-science—Current practices and future challenges,\" <i>Future Generation Computer Systems</i> 25, no. 4 (2009): 474-80.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn18\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Continuity in the Sciences</b>\r\n\r\nThe 2002 paper, “Online Scientific Data Curation, Publication, and Archiving,” by computer scientist Jim Gray and collaborators was instrumental in projecting the term data curation beyond the museum and bioinformatics domains. Gray and his colleagues were developing architecture and storage environments for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in astronomy, and they had also begun writing about a new paradigm of scientific research associated with the emergence of grid computing and a deluge of digital data. ((Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen, \"e-Science and its implications,\" <i>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences</i> 361, no. 1809 (2003): 1809-1825.)) The “fourth paradigm” referred to a new data-driven method for scientific inquiry, where analysis of expertly curated, open access data collections would complement and extend traditional methods like simulation, observation, and theoretical experimentation. ((Jim Gray, Alexander S. Szalay, Ani R. Thakar, Christopher Stoughton, and Jan Vandenberg, \"Online scientific data curation, publication, and archiving,\" <i>Proceedings of SPIE</i> (2002): 103-107; Jim Gray, David T. Liu, Maria Nieto-Santisteban, Alex Szalay, David J. DeWitt, and Gerd Heber, \"Scientific data management in the coming decade,\" <i>ACM SIGMOD Record</i> 34, no. 4 (2005) 34-41; Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Michele Tolle, eds.<i> The fourth paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery</i> (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Research, 2009).)) Data curation, central to this vision, was described as the annotation, preservation, and expert description of datasets, to be carried out, by and large, by librarians. ((Gray et al., \"Online scientific data curation, publication, and archiving.\"))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn21\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nAt the same time, the UK was embracing the potential digital transformation of a national research agenda. What had been called an informatics approach in North America and continental Europe was being labeled <i>eResearch </i>and <i>eScience </i>in the UK. ((Paulien Hogeweg, \"The roots of bioinformatics in theoretical biology,\" <i>PLoS computational biology</i> 7, no. 3 (2011): e1002021.)) A 2003 Jisc-commissioned report on the infrastructures needed to support eScience was one of the first attempts to clarify differences between preservation, archiving, and curation in relation to digital scholarship. ((Philip Lord and Alison Macdonald, <i>e-Science Curation Report: Data curation for e-Science in the UK: an audit to establish requirements for future curation and provision</i> (Digital Archiving Consultancy Limited, 2003).)) The report identifies data curation<i> </i>as the “activity of, managing and promoting the use of data from its point of creation, to ensure it is fit for contemporary purpose, and available for discovery and re-use.” It specifies that “archiving” is needed for “curation,” and “preservation”<i> </i>is “an aspect of archiving,” with all three “involved in managing change over time.” ((Ibid., 12.)) To this day, the distinctions and applications of these three concepts remain imprecise, as is also the case with the terms <i>digital curation</i>, <i>data curation</i>, and <i>data stewardship. </i>In the next section we clarify some of the differences between these terms, their use, and the overall importance in understanding the unique contribution of data curation to science and scholarship.\r\n\r\n<b>Co-Evolution of Digital Curation and Data Curation</b>\r\n\r\nIn the UK, the term digital curation first appeared in a 2001 digital preservation workshop, ((Neil Beagrie, \"Digital curation for science, digital libraries, and individuals,” <i>International Journal of Digital Curation</i> 1 (2006), 3-16.)) but later Neal Beagrie more explicitly defined it in his description of the newly formed Digital Curation Centre (DCC):\r\n<blockquote>The term “digital curation” is increasingly being used for the actions needed to maintain digital research data and other digital materials over their entire lifecycle and over time for current and future generations of users. Implicit in this definition are the processes of digital archiving and digital preservation, but it also includes all the processes needed for good data creation and management, and the capacity to add value to data to generate new sources of information and knowledge. ((Neil Beagrie, “The Digital Curation Centre” <i>Learned Publishing</i> 17, no. 1 (2004): 7-9.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn26\">\r\n</a></blockquote>\r\nThis text is nearly an exact match with the roles outlined in the 2003 Jisc report on <i>data </i>curation—evidence that early on the two concepts were thought of synonymously. Other publications advancing the concept of curation in the UK applied the terms loosely for a number of years. For example, a publication formalizing many of the original 2003 Jisc report recommendations states: “data curation concerns the long-term management of data, from its initial collection to its deposition into an archive.” ((Philip Lord, Alison Macdonald, Liz Lyon, and David Giaretta, \"From data deluge to data curation,\" <i>Proc 3th UK e-Science All Hands Meeting</i> (2004): 371-75.)) The following year, digital curation was more “broadly interpreted” as being “about maintaining and adding value to, a trusted body of digital information for current and future use.” ((David Giaretta, “DCC approach to digital curation, version 1.23,” (white paper, 2005), http://dev.dcc.rl.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Main/DCCApproachToCuration.)) Summarizing many different uses and definitions of digital curation, Yakel’s definition of <i>digital curation</i> is explicit about its place within the information professions. She refers to it as “the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including the preservation, of digital data for future use.” ((Elizabeth Yakel, \"Digital curation,\" <i>OCLC Systems &amp; Services</i> 23, no. 4 (2007): 335-340.))\r\n\r\nYakel’s publication came out the same year that we offered a definition of data curation for the Data Curation Education Program (DCEP), funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The DCEP definition states that data curation is “the active and ongoing management of data throughout its entire lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship.” ((Melissa H. Cragin, P. Bryan Heidorn, Carole L. Palmer, and Linda C. Smith, \"An educational program on data curation,\" <i>American Library Association Conference, Science and Technology Section, </i>Washington, D.C., June 25, 2007. <a href=\"http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3493\">http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3493</a>)) This definition guided development of the Specialization in Data Curation in the GSLIS master’s program and has been applied consistently in DCEP initiatives across the sciences and the humanities, including an annual Summer Institute on Data Curation. The distinction between this definition and those of digital curation is subtle, but important. The focus of data curation is on the “interest and usefulness” of data to scholarship, and this emphasizes the traditional mission of research libraries to provide information to support research and the production of new knowledge.\r\n\r\nDigital curation is, or has become, a term that better accommodates a broader range of digital material. It does not indicate what is being curated nor does it necessarily imply which communities can be purposefully served by curatorial activities. Data curation, on the other hand, relates directly to data that is produced and used by scholarly communities, and it facilitates the reuse and repurposing of data to meet new research needs. As Renear and Muñoz aptly explained in the introduction to a DCEP workshop held at the annual Digital Humanities conference, “Data curation addresses the challenge of maintaining digital information that is produced in the course of research in a manner that preserves its meaning and usefulness as a potential input for further research.” ((Trevor Muñoz and Allen Renear, “Issues in Digital Humanities Data Curation,” (white paper, 2011), http://hdl.handle.net/2142/30852).)) Their emphasis, echoing Cragin et al., is on the scholarship and research enabled by the effective curation of digital data resources. ((Cragin et al., \"An educational program on data curation.\"))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn32\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nAlthough far from complete, this account of the concept of curation provides important contextual background for the next section, where we discuss DCEP’s pedagogical approach to data curation education. As noted above, the principle of “purposeful curation” has been the guiding concept for DCEP and the Specialization in Data Curation. This area focuses exclusively on the curation of research data for scholarly and scientific communities, covering the complex theoretical and practical problems that span eScience and digital humanities.\r\n\r\n<b>Purposeful Work with Data: Beyond Stewardship</b>\r\n\r\nThe “purposeful curation” concept guiding local educational efforts was more formally articulated in response to a paper that asserted, “library science has not demonstrated that it has the theoretical foundations and knowledge base that are capable of providing the framework for handling digital entities.” ((Seamus Ross, \"Digital preservation, archival science and methodological foundations for digital libraries,\" <i>New Review of Information Networking</i> 17, no. 1 (2012): 43-68.)) We argued the contrary: Because of its commitment to the “needs of users to access and use information of value over the long term,” library and information science (LIS) is uniquely positioned to provide the kind of foundation needed for systems and services to manage digital content, especially research data. ((Palmer, Renear, and Cragin, “Purposeful Curation.”)) Further, we explained that our aim in educating data curators was not only to prepare them to build and maintain data collections but also to be responsible for the “associated indexing systems, metadata standards, ontologies, and retrieval systems” that will make it possible for research data to work in concert with existing digital libraries, archives, and repositories. Data curation efforts that embrace this orientation to user communities and their needs within and across disciplines will be equipped to enable innovative research in the sciences and humanities with curated data for “experiments in scientific laboratories, the interpretation of texts by scholars in special collections, the development of exhibits in museums, and other purposeful work with data over time.” ((Ibid.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn35\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nThis conception of curation goes beyond the roles Zorich originally envisioned, ((Zorich, \"Data management.”)) attending to data quality, authentication, security, and associated documentation and tools. It is markedly more active and extends beyond assuring reliable data access, to adding value to support and advance research capabilities. The alignment with the research process is the primary feature that distinguishes data curation from data stewardship. Data stewardship is about management of a shared resource, often embodied by one person or a designated group. ((Karen S. Baker and Lynn Yarmey, \"Data stewardship: Environmental data curation and a web-of-repositories,\" <i>International Journal of Digital Curation</i> 4, no. 2 (2009): 12-27.)) It is clearly essential to the preservation and persistence of robust data collections, but it is a function of “managing data” that implies a less active, fixed maintenance of data over time. ((Cliff Jacobs and Steven J. Worley, “Data Curation in Climate and Weather: Transforming Our Ability to Improve Predictions through Global Knowledge Sharing,” <i>The International Journal of Digital Curation</i> (2009).)) Curation, on the other hand, is concerned with availability <i>and </i>future use of data, including the enhancement, extension, and improvement of data products for reuse beyond a single scholarly community.\r\n\r\nAt the same time, it is essential to recognize that the locally developed processes of data management and stewardship within specific communities are valuable sources of practical knowledge and current practice. The specialization needs to be applicable across domains, and the rate of change in research with digital data is a continual challenge for integrating best practices into the curriculum. Case studies on data management, processing, enhancement, and sharing in scientific and humanities domains have proven to be some of the best material for teaching applied aspects of data curation. Likewise, for repository-based data curation expertise, we depend on our partnerships with national data centers and data services operations in research libraries for coverage of state-of-the-art practices. Increasingly these partners are also serving as hosts for internships and other field experiences for students to work alongside more experienced curators.\r\n\r\n<b>Foundations of Curation</b>\r\n\r\nThe core of the curriculum is a single foundational course grounded in concepts and functions that underpin the curation of research data in practice. The course draws on principles from both LIS and archival science, as well as current trends and practice within research domains and professional work in data repositories. Of the six areas within the core, three are fairly common to information management systems, especially when dealing with digital content: interoperable technical infrastructure, policy development, and intellectual property. The remaining three areas are more closely aligned with key dimensions of LIS expertise and are central to the “purposeful curation” concept: user communities and their information behavior; collection development, management, and research services; and information organization and representation.\r\n\r\nIn the data curation curriculum these dimensions are further refined in relation to problems and practices around research data. The user dimension emphasizes <i>research cultures</i><b> </b>that impact practices of data production and sharing within the system of scholarly communication; the <i>collections</i><b> </b>dimension emphasizes heterogeneous, complex data resources and their potential for reuse across the lifecycle of data, informed by key aspects of archival science; and the <i>representation</i><b> </b>dimension emphasizes the formal characteristics of information objects that carry digital data—with a particular focus on issues of identity, ontology development, and provenance. It is important to note that these dimensions cut across some of the basic areas of knowledge and skills for data curation, such as metadata. That is, while metadata activities are generally associated with representation, effective application of metadata will adequately document aspects of research cultures related to data-collection methods. High-functioning metadata will also be guided by collection issues related to granularity of description, properties of aggregate data products, and meaningful groupings of data for discovery and integration.\r\n\r\n<i>Research cultures: data production, data sharing, and scholarly communication</i>\r\n\r\nThe curation of research data needs to be informed by a detailed understanding of how data are produced and used in conducting research and how these processes fit into the larger context of scholarly communication. As is true with information behavior more generally, data practices vary in important ways across disciplines and sub-disciplines. For example, while there are a number of successful, large-scale open data initiatives, with the Protein Data Bank and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as canonical cases, they are the exception rather than the rule.\r\n\r\nWhile data curation is largely concerned with how data sharing within and across research communities can advance science and scholarship, most researchers do not make their data publically available and most research communities have yet to develop a culture of data sharing. ((Christine L. Borgman, \"The conundrum of sharing research data.\" <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 63, no. 6 (2012): 1059-1078; Anne E. Thessen and David J. Patterson, \"Data issues in the life sciences,\" <i>ZooKeys</i> 150 (2011): 15; Carol Tenopir, Suzie Allard, Kimberly L. Douglass, Arsev Umur Aydinoglu, Lei Wu, Eleanor Read, Maribeth Manoff, and Mike Frame, \"Data sharing by scientists: practices and perceptions,\" <i>PLoS One</i> 6, no. 6 (2011).)) If researchers are willing to share data, the form in which they are willing to release them may provide an easy preservation target, but it may not have the most value for long-term reuse. ((Melissa H. Cragin, Carole L. Palmer, Jacob R. Carlson, and Michael Witt, \"Data sharing, small science and institutional repositories,\" <i>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences</i> 368, no. 1926 (2010): 4023-4038.)) Moreover, actual reuse can be highly dependent on rich contextual metadata provided by data producers. ((Matthew S. Mayernik, Jillian C. Wallis, and Christine L. Borgman, \"Unearthing the infrastructure: Humans and sensors in field-based scientific research,\" <i>Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work</i> (2012); Nicholas M. Weber, Karen S. Baker, Andrea K. Thomer, Tiffany C. Chao, and Carole L. Palmer, \"Value and context in data use: Domain analysis revisited,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1-10; Laura A. Wynholds, Christine L. Borgman,  Jillian C. Wallis, Ashley Sands, and Sharon Traweek, \"Data, Data Use, and Scientific Inquiry: Two Case Studies of Data Practices,\" <i>ACM Press</i> (2012): 19.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nData curation is part of the more global context of scholarly communication in which research libraries, publishers, and scholars have always been the primary actors and stakeholders. As would be expected in this tradition, much attention has been focused on the data associated with specific journals or published papers. To date, there have been a few successful approaches in the “journal—underlying data” archiving model. ((For example, Michael C. Whitlock, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, and Allen J. Moore, \"Data archiving,\" <i>The American Naturalist</i> 175, no. 2 (2010): 145-46.)) However, some of the most challenging curation problems and, arguably, the greatest opportunities lie in our ability to make more basic research data available and interoperable across fields. ((Hanisch, Robert, and Sayeed Choudhury, \"The Data Conservancy: Building a Sustainable System for Interdisciplinary Scientific Data Curation and Preservation,\" <i>Proceedings of the PV 2009 conference, European Space Agency</i> (2009).)) Therefore, data curators should be trained and organizationally positioned to assess accurately which data collections are of value, and in which combinations and states other scholars would find them most useful. Data curators should be able to identify data that have high priority for both their immediate service community and broader domains of interest. This is a unique set of roles and responsibilities for the field of LIS, and it requires educated professionals who understand relationships among research areas and the potential affordances of data for new applications.\r\n\r\n<i>Collections: heterogeneous data, lifecycles, and archives</i>\r\n\r\nCollections have always been central to librarianship and archival science, and their importance will continue as the stores of data grow and become increasingly searchable and browsable. They will be essential units for planning and implementing curation objectives and resources, for supporting research communities, and supporting the reuse and repurposing of data. Variations on the traditional processes of selection, appraisal, and collection management are particularly relevant. ((Angus Whyte and Andrew Wilson, <i>How to Appraise &amp; Select Research Data for Curation</i>, Digital Curation Centre, 2010, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/appraise- select-research-data.)) At various scales, from big data-driven research to smaller data-intensive research, collections have significant properties that provide intellectual, social, and organizational structures for meaningful work with data. ((Carole L. Palmer, Oksana L. Zavalina, and Katrina Fenlon, \"Beyond size and search: Building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 47, no. 1 (2010): 1-10.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nCollections have life cycles of usefulness to scholarship that need to be regulated through curation, including maintenance, migration, and preservation, over time. Moreover, “collection development and collection description are formative curation activities that add value for scholarly inquiry at both the collection and [larger] aggregation levels.” ((Katrina Fenlon, Jacob Jett, and Carole L. Palmer, \"Digital Collections and Aggregations,\" <i>DHCuration Guide</i> (2011), http://guide.dhcuration.org/collections/; Carole Palmer, “Scholarly work and the shaping of digital access,” <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 56, no. 11 (2005).)) As the data accessible in digital environments continue to increase at a rapid pace, sound collection development and description will be essential to presenting data for exploration and discovery. In conjunction with searching capabilities, researchers will greatly benefit from the ability to browse dense and cohesive layers of data sources that not only anticipate researchers’ known needs, but also allow them to effectively navigate through and interpret extensive bodies of openly accessible data.\r\n\r\nCollections will increasingly need to be organized within local institutional repositories and disciplinary data repositories as researchers submit data to comply with funding-agency requirements for data-management planning and data sharing. Curators will be involved as advisors and collaborators in data-management planning, for which knowledge of collections will be key. They will need to identify which versions to retain and share; align with institutional aims and capacity for preservation and access options; assess the fitness of data for deposit in domain or consortia repositories; and advise on intellectual property issues that researchers will face in attempting to comply with these mandates.\r\n\r\nMore generally, collections will be vital to providing reliable access and preservation to data products. Over the long term, we risk ending up with data dumps rather than functional libraries of relevant and usable data assets if we ignore the art of building and organizing data collections for research communities.\r\n\r\n<i>Representation: identity, ontologies, and provenance</i>\r\n\r\nRigorous conceptual analysis of core curatorial notions such as representation, identity, authenticity, reference, and provenance is a distinctive aspect of the DCEP approach to data curation education. Although stewardship requires verifying bit sequences and ensuring that files have not been corrupted, many curation problems turn on much more challenging issues, such as whether two files contain the same data even though they use different representation languages, encodings, or formats. A comparison of bit sequences will provide no assistance here, and so is inadequate for curation that goes beyond stewardship. What is needed is a terminological framework that clarifies these issues, as well as techniques for documentation and confirmation. Getting full value from cyberinfrastructure and computational systems requires that curators be able to refine formal terminology and document the “interpretive frames” that connect reasoning across levels of abstraction. ((David Dubin, Karen Wickett, and Simone Sacchi, “Content, Format, and Interpretation,” <i>Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011</i>. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies 7 (2011), doi:10.4242/BalisageVol7.Dubin01.)) Similarly, precisely documenting the derivation of one dataset from another, critical for both scientific and humanities scholarship, also requires sophisticated conceptual frameworks, tools, and practices. To support curatorial education we are therefore developing general frameworks of concepts and terminology that can be used across disciplines. ((Renear et al., \"Towards a cross‐disciplinary notion of data level in data curation\"; Simone Sacchi, Karen Wickett, Allen Renear, and David Dubin, \"A framework for applying the concept of significant properties to datasets,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 48, no. 1 (2011): 1-10; Karen M. Wickett, Simone Sacchi, David Dubin, and Allen H. Renear, \"Identifying Content and Levels of Representation in Scientific Data,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1-10.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nA solid familiarity with semantic technologies (such as the Resource Description Framework [RDF] and the Web Ontology Language [OWL]) is increasingly important as structured terminologies and ontologies for representing scientific and cultural information are now widely used. These data organization strategies are fundamental to data curation: they help ensure that data remains meaningful; they improve software interoperability and data integration; and they support unanticipated use, as well as the mobilization of interdisciplinary approaches. Finally, even the distinctions between publication and data, and reading and analysis, are blurring; new tools are both responding to and driving changes in scholarly publishing and how researchers search, filter, scan, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content from the literature. ((Allen H. Renear and Carole L. Palmer, \"Strategic reading, ontologies, and the future of scientific publishing,\" <i>Science</i> 325, no. 5942 (2009): 828-32.)) For data curators there is no escape from engaging these fundamental issues of representation, identity, ontologies, and provenance.\r\n\r\n<b>Curation Professionals in the Workforce</b>\r\n\r\nA recent analysis of job placements for students completing the Specialization of Data Curation in the GSLIS master’s program at Illinois has been instructive for understanding the types of organizations and positions that need data professionals. The discourse in the field has emphasized that data curation expertise will need to permeate the research process at large, with curation beginning at the initial planning stages of a research project, followed by long-term data management and providing open access data for public use. ((Nicholas M. Weber, Carole L. Palmer, and Tiffany C. Chao, \"Current Trends and Future Directions in Data Curation Research and Education,\" <i>Journal of Web Librarianship</i> 6, no. 4 (2012): 305-20.)) Interestingly, our placement data show that curation professionals are filling positions in many types of organizations in roles that will, in fact, have an impact throughout the life cycle of data in the research enterprise.\r\n\r\nOf the fifty-five graduates to date, we have been able to track placement of forty-nine individuals. Thirty-three percent have taken positions in research libraries and museums. A good number of these graduates have gone to academic libraries, but some are working in national libraries, special libraries, large art museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. Twenty percent have gone to research centers, including national data centers and digital humanities and scientific research institutes, where they are more directly involved with the research applications and curation of data. Another twenty percent are in the corporate sector, which needs high-functioning data to gain competitive market advantage, but in these settings curation skills are also being blended with statistical competencies that have more traditionally been labeled as data science. The nearly fifty position titles also show how curation positions are being formalized; they range from data curator, data-management consultant, research data librarian, and digital preservation librarian to data analyst, digital asset manager, and information architect.\r\n\r\nThrough our experience with the DCEP program, the benefits of internships and practicum in data centers became evident, and field experiences are now a priority in our next phases of program development. The Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) initiative, funded by IMLS, has been a major step in building a model for integrating field experiences into MA and PhD programs through a partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a long-standing international leader in scientific data infrastructure and services. The DCERC collaboration includes the University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences, whose participating masters students complete the Foundations of Data Curation course at Illinois.\r\n\r\nThe NCAR internships, piloted with Illinois doctoral students and Tennessee masters students, have been explicitly designed to mentor students in both data management and the scientific research contexts. It is our belief that apprenticeships need to involve students directly in best practices at mature data centers and expose them to the actual data problems that active researchers experience; this will prepare them adequately to excel at curation in data-intensive research environments.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nThis paper provided an overview of our approach to data curation education. It is important to note that this approach has been greatly influenced, both formally and informally, by our many collaborators and colleagues working to improve data access and research capabilities for scholarship in both the sciences and humanities. Our “purposeful curation” perspective is not meant to be comparative to other curation programs or an exhaustive, fully articulated pedagogy. However, we do feel that our student placement data, especially the high number of graduates placed across different types of research organizations, is solid evidence for the success of this particular approach.\r\n\r\nThe historical overview presented at the beginning of the paper gave an account of the concepts and definitions related to data curation based on the literature encountered through our work on the DCEP and DCERC initiatives, as both seasoned and new LIS educators and researchers. So, while we have identified a number of landmarks and trends in the conception of data curation to date, much of the story is still to be traced, interpreted, and retold. We hope that this initial effort will encourage additions, corrections, and amendments to the history of the field, and in turn lead to better sharing of both seasoned and new pedagogical approaches to what may prove to be an important turning point for the information professions.\r\n<div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div></div>\r\n</div>','Foundations of Data Curation: The Pedagogy and Practice of “Purposeful Work” with Research Data','','inherit','open','open','','4819-revision-9','','','2013-06-28 19:40:44','2013-06-28 19:40:44','',4819,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4819-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(4942,3,'2013-06-27 19:42:44','2013-06-27 19:42:44','If you have been in an American public school between 1980 and today, it is highly probable that\r\nyou have played or watched someone playing <a title=\"Oregon Trail Series\" href=\"http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/oregon-trail-series\">The Oregon Trail</a>. ((“Oregon Trail Series,” accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Oregon Trail Series\" href=\"http://www.mobygames.com/gamegroup/oregon-trail-series\">http://www.mobygames.com/gamegroup/oregon-trail-series</a>. Some history of the game is given here: Devin Monnens, “Oregon Trail Ver. 3 (BASIC 3.1, 1978),” Desert Hat, November 7, 2010, <em id=\"__mceDel\"><em id=\"__mceDel\"><a href=\"http://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/\">http://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/</a>.</em></em>)) Originally released by the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium (MECC) for teletypes in the state\'s public schools, the <a title=\"Oregon Trail Canonization\" href=\"http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization\">game has progressed</a> from being played on a mainframe computer, to magazine type-in game, to mobile devices and <a title=\"Facebook: Oregon Settler\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler\">Facebook</a>. ((“On the Oregon Trail to Canonization,” A Video Game Canon, March 31, 2011, <a title=\"Oregon Trail Canonization\" href=\"http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization\">http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization</a>. “Oregon Trail: American Settler,” App Center, Facebook, accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Facebook: Oregon Settler\" href=\"http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler\">http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler</a>.)) More accurately called a simulation, The Oregon Trail puts the player in the shoes of an American migrant traveling to Oregon City through obstacles of weather, violence, starvation, and disease. The franchise is almost certainly the most successful educational game series, which, combined with its powerful iconic value, almost certainly guaranteed its inclusion in the case set for the second phase of <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\">Preserving Virtual</a> <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\"> Worlds</a> (PVW2). ((Preserving Virtual Worlds 2, accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\">http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/</a>.))\r\n\r\nWhen PVW2 began, we attempted to identify the significant properties of games in our case set with the hope of creating a generalizable methodology for game preservationists in the future. Examining which features changed or remained the same throughout a franchise\'s history was one way we went about identifying those properties, and The Oregon Trail, with <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\">its four-decade</a> <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\"> history</a>, was the perfect candidate. ((Jon-Paul Dyson, “Four Decades on the Oregon Trail,” CHEGheads, February 8, 2010, <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\">http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/</a>.)) The comic below illustrates some of our adventures, with otters representing the researchers. Why otters? All I will say is there might be an Easter egg in the PVW1 final report.','Of Snakebites, Squirrels, and Snow: Significant Properties of the Oregon Trail','','inherit','open','open','','4796-revision-12','','','2013-06-27 19:42:44','2013-06-27 19:42:44','',4796,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4796-revision-12/',0,'revision','',0),(4943,3,'2013-06-28 19:42:14','2013-06-28 19:42:14','If you have been in an American public school between 1980 and today, it is highly probable that\r\nyou have played or watched someone playing <a title=\"Oregon Trail Series\" href=\"http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/oregon-trail-series\">The Oregon Trail</a>. ((“Oregon Trail Series,” accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Oregon Trail Series\" href=\"http://www.mobygames.com/gamegroup/oregon-trail-series\">http://www.mobygames.com/gamegroup/oregon-trail-series</a>. Some history of the game is given here: Devin Monnens, “Oregon Trail Ver. 3 (BASIC 3.1, 1978),” Desert Hat, November 7, 2010, <em id=\"__mceDel\"><em id=\"__mceDel\"><a href=\"http://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/\">http://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/</a>.</em></em>)) Originally released by the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium (MECC) for teletypes in the state\'s public schools, the <a title=\"Oregon Trail Canonization\" href=\"http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization\">game has progressed</a> from being played on a mainframe computer, to magazine type-in game, to mobile devices and <a title=\"Facebook: Oregon Settler\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler\">Facebook</a>. ((“On the Oregon Trail to Canonization,” A Video Game Canon, March 31, 2011, <a title=\"Oregon Trail Canonization\" href=\"http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization\">http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization</a>. “Oregon Trail: American Settler,” App Center, Facebook, accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Facebook: Oregon Settler\" href=\"http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler\">http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler</a>.)) More accurately called a simulation, The Oregon Trail puts the player in the shoes of an American migrant traveling to Oregon City through obstacles of weather, violence, starvation, and disease. The franchise is almost certainly the most successful educational game series, which, combined with its powerful iconic value, almost certainly guaranteed its inclusion in the case set for the second phase of <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\">Preserving Virtual</a> <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\"> Worlds</a> (PVW2). ((Preserving Virtual Worlds 2, accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\">http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/</a>.))\r\n\r\nWhen PVW2 began, we attempted to identify the significant properties of games in our case set with the hope of creating a generalizable methodology for game preservationists in the future. Examining which features changed or remained the same throughout a franchise\'s history was one way we went about identifying those properties, and The Oregon Trail, with <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\">its four-decade</a> <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\"> history</a>, was the perfect candidate. ((Jon-Paul Dyson, “Four Decades on the Oregon Trail,” CHEGheads, February 8, 2010, <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\">http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/</a>.)) The comic below illustrates some of our adventures, with otters representing the researchers. Why otters? All I will say is there might be an Easter egg in the PVW1 final report.','Of Snakebites, Squirrels, and Snow: Significant Properties of the Oregon Trail','','inherit','open','open','','4796-revision-13','','','2013-06-28 19:42:14','2013-06-28 19:42:14','',4796,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4796-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(4944,3,'2013-06-28 19:30:22','2013-06-28 19:30:22','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nIn her article, “Disciplinarity and Disorder,” in Issue 1 of this journal, Gabrielle Dean opens her essay with a detailed and expressive “fantasy” describing the “primal scene of archival research [that] takes place in a dreary reading room,” featuring an archivist, a researcher, a cart, dusty gray boxes, and a “numbered file folder.” As her fantasy takes flight, with the researcher scribbling away and papers swirling and new collections sprouting up organically, she crafts an evocative metaphor for the life cycle of preservation and regeneration that archivists aim to enable through access to primary sources. Dean cogently deconstructs the origins and implications of this “primal scene” over the course of her essay. But what also merits highlighting in her opening metaphor are the accoutrements that populate it—the cart, the box, the file folder—familiar players on the stage of the archival encounter. These objects and symbols are evocative of that idealized moment of archaeological discovery that characterizes the use of the archive. They are objects and symbols of history, certainly, but relics, alas, of an analog age.\r\n\r\nA similar fantasy, one potentially more fraught with anxiety and dread, must darken the reveries of archivists as they attempt to provide access to more contemporary materials. A daydream involving the researcher of tomorrow may instead feature dreadful moments of “file cannot be opened” error messages, of FTP transfers gone awry, of decaying media orphaned from long-lost playback devices. Our imaginary researcher will not be awaiting archival discovery sitting in a dreary reading room, but instead exist in some networked who-knows-where, furiously emailing an endless stream of access and transfer request and constantly griping about obsolete formats and buggy interfaces. At the same time, our imaginary archivist will not be pushing carts or shelving boxes, but creating user accounts for virtual reading rooms, running pattern-recognition text-mining queries, uploading disk images, or helping users with emulation software. Like the content of our archives themselves, the props and symbols of our archival fantasies increasingly will be associated with born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nHow will traditional principles of archival arrangement and description be challenged or modified to account for born-digital materials? Arrangement and description have long been the primary method of facilitating the use of archives, and their methodologies have been dependent upon the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. The articulation of this theory in 1841 has been held as the “starting point” or beginning of the modern era of archival theory, a “watershed” event establishing the “basic principle” and “very core” of the archival endeavor. Superlatives abound. <i>Respect des fonds</i>, “more than any other principle, has come to provide the archival profession with a unique identity.” ((Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” in <i>Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies</i> (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), 108.))\r\n\r\nBut <i>respect des fonds</i> was born of a particular historic moment, for a particular type of archival document, and was conceived to address the practical needs of specific social circumstances. Even as <i>respect des fonds</i> has mutated and evolved over the decades, subject to revisions, contestations, and reaffirmations, its methodologies have largely been a product of the nature of the archival record as a physical document to be sorted, grouped, and described after receipt from a single donating entity. In an era defined by digital materials and their affordances and limitations, one in which narrative linearity often seems replaced by data-driven relationalism, the meaning of <i>respect des fonds</i> is ever more slippery.\r\n\r\nBroadly stated, <i>respect des fonds</i> is the principle of grouping records by the administration, organization, individual, or creating body in which they originated. <i>Respect des fonds</i> mandates that the records of the creating entity not be mixed with those of a different entity. It prioritizes the “organic” nature of archival records, identifying the locus of their generation, and the evidence their consolidation provides about that originating body, as essential to preserving and maintaining context. Comprised of the related “principle of original order” and “the principle of provenance,” <i>respect des fonds</i> displaced prior methods of archival arrangement that were predicated upon classifications by subject, function, topic, legal utility, chronology, and other categories. Though often referenced as a core component of archival identity, as a theoretical concept, <i>respect des fonds</i> is, as one writer says, “elusive and oft-misunderstood.” ((Dan Zelenyj, “Linchpin Imperilled: The Functional Interpretation of Series and the Principle of Respect des Fonds,” <i>Archivaria</i> 42 (1996): 126.))\r\n\r\nThe introduction of born-digital records into the archives offers an opportunity to examine how the practical methodologies of arrangement and description are shifting and how those changing practices lead to a reconsideration of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Much as digital records’ technological dependencies, ease of duplication, and subordination to features of systems and storage have led to a reassessment of the existing precepts of archival appraisal and selection, they also prompt a similar analysis of arrangement and description. One of those axioms due reassessment is the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i>.\r\n\r\nThis essay details the social and material conditions of the emergence of <i>respect des fonds</i>, the theory’s complex practical implementations and contested assumption, the emergence of alternate models, and how born-digital materials illuminate the theory’s analog origins and limitations. I will also explain the specific qualities of digital objects, including the nature of inscription and its impact on notions of original order and authenticity, as well as how nonlinear retrieval supplants the narrative logic of <i>respect des fonds</i> with a broader notion of context and discoverability. I will then consider recent interpretive methods, such as data visualization and text mining, as potential harbingers of new modes of representing and creating interfaces to digital collections—representations that better capitalize on the possibilities of digital materials. Finally, I will argue that the affordances of born-digital archives—such as their potential for parallel representation, machine-enabled interpretation, and expansive contextual and intellectual availability—provoke a reconsideration of the place of privilege of <i>respect des fonds </i>in archival arrangement and description.\r\n\r\n<b>The Old Regime</b>\r\n\r\nBefore <i>respect des</i> <i>fonds</i> can be respected, disrespected, or neglected, a better understanding of its origins is warranted, along with an examination of how the principle has (or has not) been applied and its periodic contestation. The seductive purity of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> often overshadows the concept’s decidedly complex origins. <i>Respect des fonds</i> as a guiding method of archival control was never as ennobled an idea as its contemporary evocation often implies. Its original articulation was mired in professional infighting, reductive practicalities, and the tumult and disorganization of political change.\r\n\r\nWhile we can find records grouped according to creator in some earlier instances, ((Luciana Duranti, “Origin and Development of Archival Description,” <i>Archivaria</i> 35 (1993): 50.)) the formal articulation of the concept of <i>respect des fonds</i> was, like much of modernity, a by-product of the French Revolution. The Revolution featured a simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of the archive, an attempt to both erase and recast the historical record. Most famously, when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille they destroyed its documentary contents—records that instantiated the subjugation and exploitation of the despised monarchy. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4724\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4724\" alt=\"Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background.  Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1-300x237.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"237\" /></a> Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background. Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet the revolutionaries’ also scrupulously preserved the record of their own activities. The <i>Archives Nationales</i> was established in 1790, with a head archivist, hours designated for the general public, and a centralized administration tasked both with preserving the legacy of the new government and managing select records of the Old Regime. Those tasks, however, were segregated in ways that impacted how each class of documents was handled. Records of the National Assembly were to be scrupulously maintained, while feudal titles were widely destroyed. As one Minster put it, “all the old documents with gothic script are … only legal titles of feudalism, of the subjection of the feeble to the strong.” ((As cited in Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 3, no. 3 (1940): 162.))\r\n\r\nThe management of archives during this time was chaotic. Property records were sent to one administrative body within the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, legal records to another, and documents of historical interest went to the <i>Bibliotheque Nationales</i>. At the same time, archivists were tasked with maintaining a distinction between records documenting pre- and post-Revolutionary activities. In addition, the first two administrative heads of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, Armand-Gaston Camus and Pierre Daunou, were both trained as librarians and had, by the early 1800s, established twenty-four “groupings” of records into which future accessions were to be integrated. Within these groups, additional classifications and intellectual methods of ordering existed. The archives, then, were “arranged in accordance with an arbitrarily devised ‘methodical’ scheme that was derived from library experience.” ((T. R Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archive : Principles and Techniques</i> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 169.)) As well, political tumult and instability of governance continued to have an impact on the arrangement of the archives, and “decisions about preservation, classification, inventory, and access were therefore the result not just of practical considerations or the opinions of individual archivists and librarians, but also of key shifts in national politics.” ((Lara Moore, <i>Restoring Order: The Ecole Des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870</i> (Duluth, Minnesota: Litwin Books, 2008), 17.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Origins of <i>Respect des Fonds</i></b>\r\n\r\nWhile the true extent of records destruction during the post-Revolutionary years is disputed, ((Carl Lokke, “Archives and the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 31, no. 1 (January 1968): 30-31.)) as Judith Panitch notes, “this chaotic episode of archival history reveals much about archives themselves, suggesting specifically their fundamental fragility and malleability.” ((Judith Panitch, “Liberty, equality, posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 59, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 33.)) That malleability is evident in the conflicting approaches to archival arrangement and description that characterized this era, practices that lead up to the declaration of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Records of the time were arranged primarily by sometimes-quixotic methods of classification, by schema idiosyncratic in origin and inconsistent in application. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 167.))\r\n\r\nA number of developments in the next few decades pushed this lack of uniformity to its breaking point and helped impel the conceptualization of <i>respect des fonds</i> as an archival principle, if, as I will show, less of an actual practice. The establishment of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> in 1821 created a formal institution to train archivists to staff both the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and the over 2500 provincial archives across France. Laws passed in the 1830s also drastically expanded the number of archivists mandated to work both in the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and in the provincial archives. Formal training and new positions, however, when combined with lax oversight and inconsistent guidance on practices, led, predictably, to a near-comic proliferation of methods of classification and arrangement. (See Figure 2.) Due to the proliferation of classification systems and schema, change was inevitable.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4725\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"480\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image2.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-4725\" alt=\"Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s &quot;Restoring Order,&quot; 114.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image2.jpg\" width=\"480\" height=\"383\" /></a> Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s \"Restoring Order,\" 114.[/caption]\r\n\r\nThat change came in the form of the infamous “Circular no. 14,” released in 1841 by Natalis de Wailly, Administrative Head of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>. This document is recognized as the first articulation of the fonds as the fundamental method of archival arrangement, the purpose of which was “to form a collection of all the documents which originate from a body, an organization, a family or an individual, and to arrange the different fonds according to a certain order.” ((As quoted in Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 107.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> made creatorship the organizing principle of archival records and espoused the formation of collections according to the organization, entity, family, or individual responsible for their creation. Such an arrangement would ensure, as one writer later put it, the essential need “to know where it [the archival document] was created, in the framework of what process, to what end, for whom, when and how it was received by the addressee, and how it came into our hands.” ((Michael Duchein, “Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems of Respect des fonds in Archival Science,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 67.))\r\n\r\nHowever, as Nancy Bartlett has explicated, this “watershed” moment was less momentous than contemporary evocations suggest. For one, de Wailly’s circular dictated “that <i>respect des fonds</i> was prescribed only for archival records created prior to 1789.” More contemporary fonds were to continue to be arranged categorically. In addition, minutes from subsequent meetings of the commission overseeing the work of archivists—a commission on which de Wailly served—reveal that “<i>respect des fonds</i> was if nothing more a preliminary standard for archival arrangement and description in departmental archives, a means of insuring that beginning archivists without the benefit of direct supervision might not cause too much intellectual damage to vulnerable records in their care.” ((Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 111.))\r\n\r\nThe principle was, in fact, a practical exigency, a method to simplify archival arrangement seen as more easily implemented by novice archivists than the more rigorous arrangement by classification. Bartlett also notes that <i>respect des fonds</i> remained absent from both the curriculum of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> as well as the publications of the professional society of its graduates. Lastly, the principle was, at the time, not applied to accessions into the <i>Archive Nationales</i> itself, as it operated under a different administrative department than de Wailly’s Interior Ministry.\r\n\r\n<i>Respect des fonds</i>, then, was never a perfectly realized theory. Its formation was a contingency of a unique historical moment; its conception depended upon practical necessities and its implementation was inconsistent and disputed. What today seems near dogma—that archives be arranged by fonds—was at the time novel and simplistic, more the product of utility and political manipulation than a grand inspiration regarding the functional authenticity of fonds or evidential purity towards their arrangement.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4726\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"183\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4726 \" alt=\"Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3-183x300.jpg\" width=\"183\" height=\"300\" /></a> Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>The Original Original Order</b>\r\n\r\nThough implemented inconsistently in its home country, the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained a wide acceptance across Europe. In Prussia, the theory (known as <i>Provenienzprinzip,</i> the principle of provenance) mandated that “official papers are to be maintained in the order and with the designations which they received in the course of the official activity of the agency concerned.” ((Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archives</i>, 175.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> received its most elaborate and sustained justification, and expansion, however, in the Netherlands, where the Dutch archivists Muller, Feith, and Fruin produced their famous <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> in 1898. Often referred to colloquially as the “Dutch Manual” and seen as the “starting point of archival theory and methodology,” ((Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” <i>The American Archivist </i>66, no. 2 (2003): 249.)) the work provided a detailed set of guidelines for the arrangement of records. The principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained even wider acceptance and popularity after its ratification at the First International Congress of Archivists meeting in Brussels in 1910. ((Lawrence D. Geller, “Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists, Brussels, 1910,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 16. Proceedings from the 1910 meeting can be found online at <a href=\"http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/\">http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/</a>.)) (See Figure 3.)\r\n\r\nThe Dutch Manual, and the methodologies implemented in its wake, not only forbid the intermingling of the fonds of one agency with those of another—in keeping with the French conception of <i>respect des fonds</i>—but also expanded the theory to apply to the records within each fond—the internal arrangement of the archival collection. Or as the Dutch Manual put it, “the system of arrangement must be based on the original organization of the archival collection.” ((Samuel Muller, Johan Adriaan Feith, and Robert Fruin, <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> (H.W. Wilson Co., 1968), 52.)) This concept has come to be known as the “principle of original order,” an intra-fonds corollary to the external means of arrangement associated with the principle of provenance; <i>respect des fonds</i> encompasses both principles.\r\n\r\nA closer examination of the Dutch Manual, however, reveals certain methodological impracticalities that even its authors admit. First, they claim that the original order within a fonds may be modified or “restored” to account for multiple transfers from an agency, not all of which may truly represent the idealized “original order.” As well, records may be reorganized to account for “inconsequential irregularities attributable to record-keeping officials.” The authors also note that reconstituting the original order may be avoided when “the trouble which would have to be taken in order to reconstruct the old organization is out of proportion to the result to be obtained.” ((Muller et al., <i>Manual</i>, 83.)) Needless to say, the simple idea of “restoring original order” seems itself problematic, fraught with subjective decision-making likely far removed from whatever idealized “organic” origin archivists may discover within fonds. The complicated approach to “restoration” and “reconstruction” that the Dutch Manual advises often borders on, as one writer put it, “abandoning entirely their carefully developed ethic of conservation.” ((Frank Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” <i>The American Archivist </i>45, no. 1 (1982): 28.))\r\n\r\n<b>Critique des Fonds</b>\r\n\r\nThe widespread adoption <i>of respect des fonds</i> did not proceed unquestioned, however. As early as the 1930s, some archivists were taking issue with the methodology of arranging collections according to original order. In his survey of the development of archival theory, Ernst Posner points to the German Max Bar and two Swedish archivists who demonstrated “that slavish preservation of the original arrangement of a fonds is often insufficient,” the principle of provenance “is subject to certain restrictions” that make blanket adoption impractical, and adherence to <i>respect des fonds</i> often impedes use of archival materials. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 169.))\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4747\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4747 \" alt=\"Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, &quot;The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,&quot; 1966. \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4-300x177.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"177\" /></a> Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, \"The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,\" 1966.[/caption]\r\n\r\nSome Australian and American archivists in the 1960s, primarily Peter Scott and Mario Fenyo, challenged the definition of fonds even further. The problems with the traditional concept of the fonds were manifold. Defining fonds as the records of a “transferring or controlling agency” was problematic since the agent of transfer was not always the creating agency. Fonds could also be mixed or “broken” into multiple transfers to an archive, making reconstitution difficult. Fonds could also be the result of “a succession of agencies,” blurring true creatorship. Ordering series within fonds was difficult since future accessions may need to be inserted at different places in the existing organizational system, leading to physical disorder or the constant revision of finding aids or inventories. After reviewing minutes of early NARA meetings in an attempt to define what, exactly, constitutes a fonds, Fenyo succinctly pointed out, “no one knows what the word fonds means, not even the French who invented it.” ((Mario D. Fenyo, “The Record Group Concept: A Critique,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 2 (April 1966): 230.)) For Scott, his belief that “the very arbitrariness of the concept [of the fonds] is sufficient to make one question its usefulness,” ((Peter Scott, “The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 4 (October 1966): 497.)) led him to develop the “series system” (See Figure 4) which sought to orient arrangement and description according to function and use instead of agent or material type—a theory that, Terry Cook noted, “shifted the entire archival description enterprise from a static cataloging mode to a dynamic system of multiple interrelationships.” ((Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” <i>Archivaria</i> 43 (1999): 38.))\r\n\r\nThe principle of original order underwent a similar critique. A lack of clarity on the custodianship of records prior to their delivery to an archive, the problem of multiple and ongoing accessions, and the potential for incoherent or unknown methods of ordering or classification by creating bodies all led Fenyo to proclaim, “archivists generally believe that the arrangement of series within a record group reflects to some extent the organization and even history of the agency that created those records.… But the records in the National Archives reflect no such thing.” ((Fenyo, \"The Record Group Concept,\" 236.)) For archives consisting of personal papers, original order is seen as particularly problematic, since a chronological arrangement seemingly provides the greatest meaning and value to the records of an individual, but is unlikely to be the order of records upon accession. Restoration of original order also risks destroying the contextual information accrued by collections that have passed through multiple states of custodianship prior to their acceptance into the archive. ((Debra Barr, “Protecting Provenance: Response to the Report of the Working Group on Description at the Fonds Level,” <i>Archivaria</i> 28 (Summer 1989): 141-145. See also Robert Edwards, “‘With Respect to Original Order’: Changing Values in Archival Arrangement,” <i>Archives Association of British Columbia</i> 11, no. 1 (Winter 2001).)) Lastly, the principle of original order prioritizes filing systems of unknown or dubious legitimacy over the principle of use or accessibility. As Frank Boles states, “usability acknowledges the evidential superiority of documents over filing systems by placing primary emphasis on access to documents.” ((Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” 31.)) In this critique, usability and original order are often in conflict.\r\n\r\n<b>Of Bonds and Parallels</b>\r\n\r\nOther conceptual models besides the series system have attempted to address these critiques by forming new ideas about how order or grouping can evidence archival authenticity, identity, and meaning. One theory to articulate the interrelations of individual records can be found in Luciana Duranti’s notion of the archival bond, which she defines as the “network of relations that each record has with the records belonging in the same aggregation.” ((Luciana Duranti, “The Archival Bond,” <i>Archives and Museum Informatics</i> 11 (1997): 213-18.)) Not to be confused with context, which exists outside the record, the archival bond, for Duranti, is core to the identity of the record. As she states, “documents that are expressions of a transaction are not records until they are put into relation with other records.” ((Ibid., 216.)) Emerging from research into the authenticity of electronic records (including the InterPARES project), the archival bond identifies a web of documentary co-dependencies that presumes an inheritance and relationship between records based on functional proximity. ((“The InterPARES Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://www.interpares.org\">www.interpares.org</a>.))\r\n\r\nPerhaps the most exhaustive attempt to deal with many difficulties that exist within the gulf between <i>respect des fonds</i> as principle and practice was undertaken by Michel Duchein in 1983. ((Duchein, \"Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems,\" 64–82.)) While Duchein proposes solutions to the many problems of the fonds concept, the reader cannot help but be overwhelmed by the fact that his cataloging of the “theoretical problems” and “practical difficulties” far outnumber, and begin to drown out, his proposed solutions. For Duchein, within fonds there can be all sorts of nebulous, arbitrary, and forgotten methods of classification “from which all imaginable disorders flow.” He calls these, in a poetic moment, “brutal manipulations.” ((Ibid., 77.)) But after this disquisition, on the last page of his article Duchein mentions one idea that seems if not prescient, then at least transitive in the way it conceives of context: the <i>parallelismus membrorum</i>, “the similarity of parallel files.” <i>Parallelismus membrorum</i> is a rhetorical term referring to the patterns within a text formed by the utilization of repeated grammatical structures. (“I came. I saw. I conquered,” is a brief example). Duchein here employs the motif to refer to the contextual relations that exist between records of different fonds, the network of meanings that stretch across the archive.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4927  \" alt=\"Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, &quot;The Little Truck.&quot; The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, &quot;Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5-300x199.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a> Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, \"The Little Truck.\" The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, \"Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”[/caption]\r\n\r\nChris Hurley explored an idea similar to <i>parallelismus membrorum</i> in his delineation of “parallel provenance” a concept built around “composing different things from the same particles—combining things in different ways to produce a variety of views of what they look like in the aggregate … not so much about identifying a different creator as recognizing manifold context.” ((Chris Hurley, “Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?,” <i>Archives and Manuscripts</i> 33, no. 1 (2005): 126.)) (See Figure 5.) Other contemporary writers, such as Laura Millar and Geoffrey Yeo, have sought to stretch the meaning of the fonds even further, arguing it exists purely at the conceptual level. ((Geoffrey Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds and the Physical Collection,” <i>Archivaria</i> 73 (Spring 2012): 43-91; Laura Millar, “The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance: Archival Context in Space and Time,” <i>Archivaria</i> 53 (Spring 2002): 1-15.)) But as the definition of the fonds becomes more distant, more abstract, its privileging as a form of aggregation seems less certain, especially in a digital environment in which creatorship is but one of many means of grouping records.\r\n\r\nThe archival bond, the series system, <i>parallelismus membrorum, </i>and parallel provenance all mark attempts to theorize relationships between records and collections in ways that can elide the practical problems of <i>res</i><i>pect des fonds</i>. Equally, these ideas represent a continued expansion of context beyond the limitations of grouping by creatorship or creator-derived order. In each case, similarities and dependencies emerge out of cross-collection networks or semantically derived principles. As the models gain distance from the vagaries of the individual records, one starts to recognize a familiar pattern of removal—not a disjunction, exactly, but a subtle passage from the material trace to the abstract representation. The familiarity is borne of the similar movement from item to representation that characterizes electronic records and their attendant phenomenological tension between the physical inscription on a drive and the symbolic interface on a screen.\r\n\r\n<b>Bit Level Processing</b>\r\n\r\nBut enough of models. Consider instead the bit, the binary, the magnetic flux reversal of the spinning disk that is the origin of the digital object. Material inscription offers a good point to segue into an examination of digital records and how they both complicate or even circumvent historical notions of <i>respect des fonds </i> while at the same time enabling realization of a more expansive notion of context and interrelation.\r\n\r\nStarting at the bit level, the characteristics of inscription (how digital information is written onto storage media) call into question the idea of original order. When data is written to a storage device, it has a material, physical trace, but that trace is far from the legibility or interpretability we associate with analog documents. As Matt Kirschenbaum has noted in his study of new media and digital forensics, “we write <i>on</i> paper, but we write <i>to</i> a magnetic disk (or tape)”; the semantic difference signifies that the act of inscription is “logically distinct” from the act of creation and intellectual manipulation. ((Matt Kirschenbaum, <i>Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination</i> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 87. Emphasis in original.)) (See Figure 6.) In addition, a key component of storage media is that it is random access; that means the bits composing a record are inscribed to available clusters across the platter of a drive depending on which tracks and sectors are available for inscription. That is, the component bits of a digital object are non-sequential in their material physical arrangement. Aggregated, they can create an interpretable object, but their component location is nonlinear. Here, even at the bit level of a single item, there is no original order. Furthermore, each time these bits are reconstructed, each time the file is accessed and translated into an interpretable, editable representation, the file will be altered in minute ways (for instance, a file’s “last opened” date) and thus be composed of a new order as new bits are assigned to other available areas of the disk. As Kirschenbaum notes, quoting a dictum of forensic science, “every contact leaves a trace.” The act of interpreting a digital object, thus, continually alters its material order.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4729\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4729 \" title=\"bailey_archivejournal_image6\" alt=\"Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head.<br />Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.[/caption]\r\n\r\nMoving beyond the non-sequential arrangement of bits of individual records, but remaining at the forensic level, other features of the digital environment challenge long-standing presumptions of authenticity and uniqueness that are dependent upon physical arrangement or description. Temporary files, such as those stored by auto-save or recovery programs, mean that a drive can contain multiple versions of identical files, many of them beyond the management (or even awareness) of their creator. This “ambient data” is matched by other features of data dispersal throughout a storage system, such as “swap space” (disk space sometimes allocated for use by RAM) and “disk slack” (which accounts for the difference between the actual file size and the disk space used for storage) that themselves complicate ideas of order and linearity. Storage becomes a hidden, dynamic world in which physical arrangement on a spinning drive consists of the equivalent of dispersed crevices, hidey-holes, and secret areas where data proliferates. Kirschenbaum asserts, “there is, in short, no simple way to know how many instances of a single file are residing in how many states, in how many different locations, at any given moment in the operating system.” ((Ibid., 52.)) As well, digital objects themselves have the potential to contain trace data that, while possibly not achieving the singular identity of a record, can have evidential value or help establish provenance.\r\n\r\nTake, for instance, Kirschenbaum’s exploration of a floppy disk image, in which he finds evidence of how the storage media was used over time and what its hidden and partially deleted data can manifest about its user: “[W]e discover on the original diskette the incompletely overwritten remains of previous software … a piece of 1980s software culture frozen in allographic amber.” ((Ibid., 140.)) Discovering this legacy information reveals multiple levels of creatorship and a trail of ownership and social and cultural meaning that extend beyond the object, the creator, or the fonds. In this case, the unintentionally preserved (by the user, at least) data provides a testament to its origins that is not visible in the individual files themselves. Here provenance is not a result of aggregation or description but a characteristic of how digital information is created and transmitted. Context is not just relational, implied, or conceptualized, but can be a part of the very media itself, like secret, half-formed barnacles clinging to the vessel of the digital record. Incomplete but decipherable. Fragmentary but meaningful. Allographic amber.\r\n\r\n<b>Fonds Essentialism</b>\r\n\r\nNeedless to say, most people do not interact with digital information at the forensic level. In Kenneth Thibodeau’s useful model, digital objects are compounds, composed of a physical, logical, and conceptual object. Respectively, those adjectives refer to the physical inscription on storage media; the logical suite of translational software and processes that access and “read” that inscription; and the conceptual object the user interacts with, such as the text, image, or interface on a screen. ((Kenneth Thibodeau, “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years,” in <i>The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective</i> (Washington D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2002).)) The conceptual object—the representational environment of the screen as experienced in the word processing program, the image editor, the social media app—inculcates its own affordances and logic on the creation or use of records. In fact, given the hidden, inscrutable nature of storage and inscription, the formal representation of digital objects on a screen can have an outsized influence on their creation, management, and perception—an interpretive tendency that Nick Montford calls “screen essentialism.” Considering the extensive influence that the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i> has had, historically, on how archival collections are arranged and described, a similar predilection may characterize the archival enterprise—call it <i>fonds essentialism</i>.\r\n\r\nThe conceptual object—the screen—presents its own challenges to the implied narrative of current modes of archival description. The way that a user interacts with an aggregation of digital materials is fundamentally different from how a user would interact with a set of document boxes or a finding aid. The screen imposes its own logic, its own “formal regimen,” in Kirschenbaum’s terms, on how digital objects are interpreted or accessed, but also how they are described. Traditional archival representation for analog materials emerges from a narrative: a story about what a collection is, what it holds, and the order and location of its contents. It moves through a descriptive summary of contextual detail and administrative information and on to a hierarchy of series and subseries often arranged by type, function, chronology, or other broad categories. Papers, folders, boxes, and series must be arranged in physical space, after all, and that comes to shape how they are arranged in the intellectual space of description. A finding aid is a narrative to be read and its intellectual availability is largely linear and structural. The conceptual object of the digital record and the interface to an aggregation of digital records offer quite a different type of interaction.\r\n\r\nText mining and hyperlinks are simple examples of ways to navigate large groups of materials absent a singular narrative sequence. Lev Manovich, in theorizing new media, has noted that the database (or, the database logic) has supplanted narrative as the method of interacting with digital information. In new media, “narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among others,” and digital information assumes “the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself.” ((Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” <i>Journal of A&amp;I Society</i> 14, no. 2 (May 2000): 176-77.)) In a database, objects are related but not ordered. The database logic is nonlinear and there is no original order because order is dependent upon query. Search and navigation become algorithm-dependent and not predetermined by a creator, an archivist, or a static finding aid—though all of those organizations are themselves available. Digital objects will have an identifier, yes, but where they “rest” in intellectual space is contingent, mutable. The key point is that, even at the level of representation, arrangement is dynamic: access and representation need not depend on the fonds. Description becomes relational as well and can extend beyond individual aggregations of records. The logic of physical space no longer drives retrieval or predominates in description. Original order and provenance are not lost or obviated in this model, but they are not the exclusive means of access, either.\r\n\r\n<b>Recent Practices</b>\r\n\r\nCase studies from projects handling significant amounts of born-digital records provide insight into the theoretical and practical problems of <i>respect des fonds</i>. As the Emory University project asked of the born-digital content in its Salmon Rushdie acquisition, “Would we treat the born-digital files the same as print material? Would we impose any sort of arrangement on the materials? How much added description could we provide? As the following discussion will reveal, the application of archival theory and principles may shift to accommodate the differences between paper and born-digital archives.” ((Laura Carroll et al., “A Comprehensive Approach to Born-Digital Archives,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 72.)) Or, as the large-scale, born-digital Vancouver Olympics project team put it, “core archival activities may diverge from long-established practices when moving into the digital environment.” ((Courtney C. Mumma, Glenn Dingwall, and Sue Bigelow, “A First Look at the Acquisition and Appraisal of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Fonds: Or, SELECT * FROM VANOC_Records AS Archives WHERE Value=‘true’;,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 93.)) Along with the multi-institutional AIMS project and the PARADIGM (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) project in the UK, these case studies detail the practical issues involved in rethinking arrangement and description in born-digital archives. ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/</a>; Paradigm project, “Workbook on Digital Private Papers,” The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (Paradigm) Project, accessed October 2012,  <a href=\"http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html\">http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nTaken together, the projects provide an overview of how arrangement may look in entirely born-digital collections. All note the difficulty in parsing user-generated description and the often quixotic or meaningless nature of directory structures and naming. The projects largely employed filtering, text mining, and other cross-record queries to determine the content of most files. The sheer volume of files contained in accessions precluded any item-level content review or hierarchical rearrangement; yet, at the same time, “the creation of file and item descriptions and inventories is not only easier and faster, it yields much richer information.… What takes hours or days to perform in the paper environment takes mere seconds to accomplish in the digital environment, and is done to a greater level of detail.” ((Mumma et al., \"A First Look,\" 115-16.))\r\n\r\nThough the many technical processes necessary for format validation, emulation, automated metadata extraction, and other methods of processing born-digital archives are too complex to be fully recounted here, these case studies point to their key characteristics. (See Video 1.) Arrangement, as we think of it, is no longer a process of imposing intellectualized hierarchies or physical relocation; instead, it becomes largely automated, algorithmic, and batch processed. At the same time, archival representation will build upon the affordances of the digital objects themselves to extract and compile metadata that can then be repurposed to bridge and augment a wealth of contextual relations far beyond the order of their creation and their agency of origin.\r\n\r\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAhbR8dyp8\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Video 1. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 2011.</div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Visual Descriptions</b>\r\n\r\nAs the “logical associations of records extend beyond the records themselves and embrace relations with other entities in the wider world,” as Geoffrey Yeo puts it, archivists will be tasked with building interfaces that draw upon these aforementioned possibilities and linking them to the online interfaces through which records will be made available. ((Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds,” 71.)) The interface thus becomes the “critical element in the interaction between documentary evidence and its consumers.” ((Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past,” <i>Archival Science</i> 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 24.))\r\n\r\nSince few archives are accessioning entirely born-digital collections, it is difficult to find archival examples of a description for such a collection. Born-digital content that is currently being processed is usually a small portion of a larger physical collection and, as such, is integrated in a hybrid fashion into traditional finding aids; see, for instance, \"<a href=\"http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9p3038mq/\">Series 8: Born digital files</a>,\" \"<a href=\"http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/rushdie1000/\">Series 11: Computers and related devices</a>,\" or \"<a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">Series 13: Computer files</a>.\"\r\n\r\nThere are, however, some archival projects, as well as work in the digital humanities, that offer a window into how researchers and scholars are making using of large sets of digital data. While the data sets and digital records being utilized are not necessarily archival collections, the tools, methods of inquiry, and cross-collection, multi-institutional repositories that emerge from these projects presage both how entirely born-digital archives may come to be used and what digital archival collection interfaces may look like in the future.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4928\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4928  \" alt=\"Figure 7. Image from &quot;Data Mining with Criminal Intent&quot; presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7-300x179.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"179\" /></a> Figure 7. Image from \"Data Mining with Criminal Intent\" presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\nTwo projects taking an innovative, insightful approach to exploring archival collections through the mining of large archival corpora are The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online and Cameron Blevins’s work text mining and topic modeling Martha Ballard’s diary. ((The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online can be found at <a href=\"http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/\">http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/</a>, and the associated Criminal Intent project can be found at <a href=\"http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/\">http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/</a>. Cameron Blevin’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary can be found online at <a href=\"http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/\">http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/</a> and at <a href=\"http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml\">http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml</a>.)) The Old Bailey Proceedings provides access to nearly 200,000 digitized trial records from London’s criminal courts, spans almost 250 years, allows full text searching, and has an API through which users can query the archive. The With Criminal Intent project has built a suite of related tools that can help perform data-mining projects using this archive. (See Figure 7.) This project measures and visualizes trends over time as a means of revealing historical themes, building and revealing new narratives, and providing insights into the past through data-driven analysis.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4731\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4731 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Screenshot from &quot;Mining the Dispatch&quot; website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8-300x210.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\" /></a> Figure 8. Screenshot from \"Mining the Dispatch\" website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.[/caption]\r\n\r\nBlevins’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary features a different collection, a single diary by an eighteenth-century housewife composed of almost 10,000 entries from 1785 to 1812. This project aspires to a similar goal of revealing novel insights into, and interpretations of, historical material through the ability of digital tools to mine vast sets of information. Blevins uses topic modeling—an algorithmic method that searches word patterns and groupings throughout large collections of texts (for Ballard’s diary, each entry was treated as a different “text”)—to chart and track thematic trends across the diary. A similar approach has been taken by the Mining the Dispatch project, which examines changing sentiments toward the Civil War over the course of six years (over 112,000 items) in the Richmond, Virginia <i>Daily Dispatch</i> newspaper. ((“Mining the Dispatch,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/\">http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/</a>.)) (See Figure 8.)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThese projects may fall under the broader rubric of the digital humanities, and the collections they are working with may not be archival collections in the traditional sense, but they offer a glimpse of the discovery, navigation, exploration, and analytic tools that foreshadow uses of digital archival collections. Other initiatives have sought to build upon the network of social relations that influence records creation. The SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) Project “provides access to the socio-historical contexts ([including] people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created” through the use of the EAC-CPF standard that describes corporate bodies, persons, and families. ((“SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/\">http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/</a>.)) Early results show a promising method for using social context for discovery and interpretation.  (See Figure 9.) The archivists at Stanford University who are managing the Robert Creeley collection, which contains a significant quantity of born-digital content, especially emails, have used the custom-built MUSE tool for exploring semantic patterns in email archives. ((The Robert Creeley collection can be found at <a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html</a>. For more information on the MUSE tool visit <a href=\"http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/\">http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/</a>.)) (See Figure 10.) Similarly, other projects have explored building unique visual interfaces to archival collections that extend contextual relations across collections, archives, and disciplines. (See Video 2.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4732\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4732 \" alt=\"Figure 9. Image from &quot;Historic Social Networks&quot; presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 9. Image from \"Historic Social Networks\" presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4727\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4727 \" alt=\"Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10-300x265.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"265\" /></a> Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\nhttp://vimeo.com/6694353\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\" style=\"text-align: left;\">Video 2. Visible Archive Series Browser, Mitchell Whitelaw. 2012.</div>\r\nWhat distinguishes these projects from archival representations of old is that context and meaning are not exclusively provided through descriptive, narrative details that precede an arrangement and location list, but instead through networks, inter-linkages, modeling, and content analysis. Users can move dynamically within a collection and laterally across collections. Search, query, and tools like topic modeling also allow the user to build their own patterns and hierarchies for discovery. In this view, archival description still plays a crucial role in providing information on what something is or how it came to be created, but no longer is the fonds or idea of original order the sole determinant of representation.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nAs Luciana Duranti has noted, archival description “has been carried out or not carried out depending on specific needs and conditions, attitudes and requirements, and its products have consistently reflected the conceptions about archives held by the society of the time.” ((Duranti, “Origin and Development,” 53.)) In the physical world of items, folders, boxes, and shelves, the archive must be sorted, ordered, and stored sequentially in space. Those properties, along with social, cultural, and political attitudes have driven how archival arrangement and description are theorized and practiced. Indeed, description itself has always had to serve multiple purposes: to provide historical or biographical information, scope and content detail, physical location for retrieval, administrative information for ongoing management, and restrictions and material types governing use. In a sense, description itself is a compound object, tugged between the needs of physical arrangement, intellectual representation, and user expectation. The properties of digital records allow archivists to revisit that negotiation. At the same time, other qualities of digital information, like the forensic disk image, have the potential to preserve both a mechanical version of “order” as well as provenancial and contextual information that formerly were provided through description. File fixity, forensic imaging, directory manifests, and auto-generated metadata may all come to play a larger role in defining provenance.\r\n\r\nWe disrespect des fonds, then, not as an act of elimination or insubordination, but in order to bring other contextual relations to its same level of privilege. Consider it less a disrespect, perhaps, than a humbling; or, instead, consider it a reaffirmation that the multiplicity of meanings possible with digital records can be better realized through an ongoing interrogation of archival traditions of arrangement and description. In rethinking <i>respect des fonds</i>, we gain a better awareness of the extent to which the material affordances of paper records have had an undue influence on how we conceptualize and practice grouping and describing collections. Bits, however, are fundamentally different at the material and symbolic levels. The use of digital objects is different as well, influenced by computational processing, algorithmic query, automation, and dynamism, not to mention social conditions, user expectations, technology dependencies, storage requirements, and a host of other characteristics of how we create and use technology.\r\n\r\nParallels and bonds, series and topics, models and paradigms; at times these concepts have collided and resulted in a seeming antagonism between ideas like original order and random access, historical contingency and abstract principle, finding aid and dynamic query. But there have been similarities too: how the tension between record and representation mirrors that of inscription and screen; and how the component nature of digital objects resembles the component purpose of traditional archival description. To entrench methods of arrangement and description borne of the qualities of physical collections is to disregard the potential expansion of context that digital information can support. In recognizing how historically and socially contingent traditional practices (and the theories spawning those practices) were, we better recognize their potential dysfunction in a time of born-digital records. This is not to say that we should discard the idea of the fonds or the utility of original order, but perhaps it is time to revoke their privileged place in archival discourse and revisit the true goals of arrangement and description in light of the capabilities of digital records. Maybe then we can begin to understand what is possible when we think of collections as mutually contextual and interrelated instead of cloistered and static. And perhaps then other bonds, other parallels, other contexts, meanings, and interpretations can receive the same amount of respect that we have, for too long now, granted the fonds.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWikipedia articles created as part of this work:\r\n\r\nRespect des fonds: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds</a>\r\n\r\nOriginal Order: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order</a>\r\n\r\nArchival Bond: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond</a>','Disrespect des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives','','inherit','open','open','','4722-revision-37','','','2013-06-28 19:30:22','2013-06-28 19:30:22','',4722,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4722-revision-37/',0,'revision','',0),(4945,3,'2013-06-27 19:47:49','2013-06-27 19:47:49','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"746\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-4704 \" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-932x1024.jpg\" width=\"746\" height=\"819\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))</blockquote>\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n<blockquote>Another big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)</blockquote>\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n<blockquote>I know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)</blockquote>\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n<blockquote>It’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)</blockquote>\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n<blockquote>I wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)</blockquote>\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image, ((For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.)) but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts. ((A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420\">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420</a>.)) As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars. ((Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.)) When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)</blockquote>\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’” ((Ibid., 22.)) Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.” ((Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.)) This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable, ((Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.)) researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable. ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.” ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project. ((Ibid., 264.)) Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.))\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent, ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event. ((Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.)) This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal. ((The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at <a href=\"http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members\">http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members</a>.)) As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective, ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value. ((See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.)) Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials, ((See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.)) but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n<blockquote>Clearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)</blockquote>\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists. ((ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.))\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n<blockquote>Most of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)</blockquote>\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.” ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.))\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago, ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.)) before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error. ((Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.” ((Ibid., 17.))\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use. ((Ibid., 17-18.)) One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities. ((A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at <a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html\">http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n<blockquote>People don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)</blockquote>\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n<blockquote>We did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)</blockquote>\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. ((The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).)) Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-22','','','2013-06-27 19:47:49','2013-06-27 19:47:49','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-22/',0,'revision','',0),(4950,1,'2013-06-28 19:39:41','2013-06-28 19:39:41','<em>Based on our experiences in the academic library, archives, and data curation communities, we present an informal discussion of the relationships between these branches of information science. In this conversational exchange, we decipher concepts of data curation for librarians and archivists while also translating library and archival theory and tradition for the data environment. Beginning with basic questions about the day-to-day realities of managing scientific data in comparison to digital library collections, we discuss roles and practices, seeking both to identify common goals and functions as well as to explore where and how our cultures diverge. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and together our fields support the diverse and ever-changing needs of researchers and information consumers in distinct but complementary ways. </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong>Seeing a Family Resemblence</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Kristen: In 2006, when I decided to go to library school to be an archivist, Lynn was working at Scripps Institution of Oceanography as an information manager. I wasn’t totally clear on what her job was, but I knew it involved data. The first time one of my library school professors brought up “metadata” in class I got excited: “Lynn always talks about metadata!” Since I took my position as Digital Services Librarian at the University of Scranton in 2008, I have come across more and more data issues in both the archival side of my job (digital collections) and in the librarian side of my job (supporting digital scholarship). I started calling Lynn for help.</p>\r\n\r\n<blockquote>Lynn: When I started library school, one of the most exciting aspects for me was learning about this mature, sophisticated ecosystem that already existed for gathering, describing, categorizing, and managing information. There was a system of roles, infrastructure, services, and expertise that conceptually mapped so well to the data world. Kristen would send me archives articles that really resonated with my data issues. It became clear that our respective realms of archives, libraries, and data are fundamentally linked.</blockquote>\r\nK: We quickly noticed, though, that we often have different philosophies about information management and that we tend to use different vocabulary to describe what we do. As we started to untangle the complex relationships between archives, libraries, and data, we found value in each other’s knowledge and expertise.\r\n<blockquote>L: I see data curation as a discipline that cuts across the Library and Information Sciences field. Data curation combines skills from librarianship, archives, information literacy, metadata, technical services, and many other areas. By identifying and articulating similarities and differences between data curation and recognized aspects of LIS, we can plan better for more integrated systems, services, and roles.</blockquote>\r\nK: One of the common (though admittedly simplistic) distinctions drawn between archivists and librarians is a difference in how we prioritize our goals. Both professions are interested in information access and preservation, but librarians prioritize immediate, affordable access while archivists prioritize long-term preservation. Where does data curation fit in? Do your goals as a curator of scientific data differ from the goals of librarians and archivists?\r\n<blockquote>L: The broad goal of data curation is to support scientific research through enabling long-term reuse of data. On the ground, that means data curators work across multiple levels: from defining and supporting strategic metadata creation early in the research cycle, through documentation about research processing, to capturing research “products” and preserving them for reuse. It seems like this is a blend between library and archives goals with support services, immediate access, and preservation all included in data curation. Given that we share the same ultimate goal of making information accessible now and into the future, I think the data community can learn a lot from both the archives and library communities.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Containers, Content, and Context</strong>\r\n\r\nK: Likewise, I think archivists and librarians have a lot to learn from data curators. For starters, I’m not sure I understand what “data” curation really is. When I think “data,” I think of numbers in a spreadsheet. Beyond that, I don’t have a good mental picture of what data looks like.\r\n<blockquote>L: A good working definition of “data” for LIS professionals is “workable/usable chunks of content,” whether values in a printed journal article table, numbers in a spreadsheet, pixels in an image, etc. For example, you can think of a digital humanities scholar viewing the text inside a book as data. But I think your question hints at a broader difference between library and data work—data are the content, libraries are usually more interested with the container. I think it\'s a granularity issue.</blockquote>\r\nK: That\'s a good point. At my library, the way we manage our collections, and the way that users access our collections, does center on physical or digital “containers.” Our books are stored in a different place than our microfilm, for example, and our streaming media is stored in a different place than the text and image files in my digital collections. I think some of my confusion about data curation stems from not understanding what kind of “container” your data is in. What formats do data usually come in? What kinds of files do data curators need to manage and preserve?\r\n<blockquote>L: Data come in many containers, from different types of files to databases and paper logbooks. In some ways we need to manage and preserve all of them. From a scientific perspective, though, it doesn’t matter what kind of container is used, so we have a lot more flexibility in moving content around. There are exceptions to this rule, but in general it is the content—the measurements, observations, model predictions, and values, for instance—that is important.</blockquote>\r\nK: Doesn\'t format play a role in long-term access, though? For archivists, format is a major concern in digital preservation planning. We worry about how to preserve different kinds of files over time in the face of software and hardware obsolescence.\r\n<blockquote>L: In data, the bigger question is “what functionality do we need to offer?” Long-term format decisions will lean heavily on that answer. While we absolutely need to preserve access and are looking for strategies for avoiding obsolescence, the primary aim of scientific data curation is to enable future use of the data, not necessarily to enable access to the original scientist’s files. Carrying forward the data format and container is not nearly as crucial as capturing the data context (for example, the conditions under which the data were collected).</blockquote>\r\nK: Preserving context is a priority for archivists as well, but it seems like we have different understandings of what “context” is or should be. Archivists want to be able to ensure that future users can access the content of archival documents, but we also want to preserve the “look and feel” of the information environment in which the file was created. To me, file format is a part of the context in which a record was created.\r\n<blockquote>L: There is a trade-off here for scientific data; sometimes context can get in the way. For instance, we often see Excel files with multiple tables per sheet, color-coded cells, and notes mixed with values. While all of that formatting can show the process used by the original researcher and may be valuable to a science historian, other researchers looking to reuse the data need to manually sift through the file to find the content they need.</blockquote>\r\nK: That’s an interesting difference from traditional archival practice. In order to capture the context in which records were created, archivists typically organize our collections based on provenance (what office or person they came from), and we usually maintain original order, even if that makes individual documents more difficult to find—that is, even if that makes the collection less functional or less accessible to the end user. That said, one of the things I like about working with digitized materials is that I have more freedom with arrangement. I can organize my digital collections in a more accessible way, noting in the metadata how the original, physical documents are arranged. What aspects of context do you try to capture for your data?\r\n<blockquote>L: With scientific data, the scientist and the scientist’s intent are important aspects of the data context. For field scientists, they (and sometimes only they) know what actually happened out in the field, and what oddities might emerge during data processing (for example, “That reflectance value looks strange. Remember on that cruise, though, the captain was new to the ship and wasn’t very good at keeping the boat steady while we deployed? It might be a shadow signature”). Maybe the researcher switched their sampling plan partway through the study because their experience told them that the really interesting thing was happening slightly outside of the planned area. Their data are a reflection of all of the physical, intellectual, and instinctual decisions made, capturing parts of the resulting experience. All of that context is often essential to interpreting the data, but it can’t be easily included in metadata. Our standards aren’t yet mature enough to be able to communicate to an end user the context in which the data were created, and data creators don’t have the habit of including that information in documentation.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Metadata </strong>\r\n\r\nK: So it seems like both data curators and digital archivists face a common challenge of creating and capturing complex, contextual metadata in systematic, effective, and (hopefully!) standardized ways.\r\n<blockquote>L: Absolutely! I would add that metadata need to be useful, sharable, and discoverable, along with machine-, human-, and increasingly browser- and search engine-readable. I would definitely consider metadata to be an area needing more research.</blockquote>\r\nK: While we’re talking about metadata, are there “levels” of metadata in data curation? That is, archivists can describe information at the collection level, series level, item level, and even page level, but librarians don’t usually think this way—it’s more like one object (for example, one book), one bibliographic record.\r\n<blockquote>L: Levels are a hugely important part of data in the sciences. Data need description at multiple levels, though our levels and terminology are not yet well defined. Even the term “dataset” is poorly defined; the content and nature of datasets vary widely. One dataset might contain one type of data from a single field survey, while another might aggregate years of field studies with multiple data types into a dataset. “Collection,” “project,” “study,” “file,” “record,” and “granule” are other important terms relating to levels, though there is still discussion about what these mean. Despite the lack of consensus in language, data curators are ideally collecting metadata at many different levels. There is always a struggle to capture as much metadata as possible given limited resources and an evolving understanding of what metadata we actually need.</blockquote>\r\nK: There’s a similar tension between quantity and quality in digital collections. Given limited resources, is it better to make more content available more quickly, with less metadata? Or is deep and detailed metadata more valuable to potential users, even if it means that it takes us longer to publish new content? A well-known paper by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner, called “<a title=\"More Product, Less Process\" href=\"http://archivists.metapress.com/content/c741823776k65863/fulltext.pdf\">More Product, Less Process</a>,” [PDF] ((Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” <i>American Archivist</i> 68 (2005): 208-63.)) encouraged archivists to decrease the time they spent processing physical collections in order to maximize the quantity of archival resources available to the public, at the expense of in-depth description and intellectual control. The idea of “more product, less process” (MPLP) is often applied to digital collections as well as traditional archives. ((See, for example, Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” <i>American Archivist</i> 73 (2010): 175-203.)) On a practical level, I determine how deeply we’ll describe a collection based on how much value I think that description will add for our users. What kind of metadata do users tend to look for in the data world?\r\n<blockquote>L: We keep metadata about a project (very high level, related to funding awards or research theme) for contextual information and for discovery, since many researchers know about projects in their fields; however, that project-level description doesn’t really help with understanding the data themselves. So we use metadata at the “dataset” level to provide context for the actual data, to help researchers who aren’t familiar with the project find what they are looking for, and to give credit to the data creators. Beyond this discovery level, metadata creation and prioritization get tricky; usability requirements start to depend on what the data (re)user is trying to do, and domain knowledge starts to become more and more helpful. I add the “(re)” here to point out that especially observational data available online have often already been used; acknowledging the original intent and use of the data is important when trying to carry forward data context.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Creators and Users</strong>\r\n\r\nK: That brings us to the idea of “users.” All three fields are service-oriented—we want to help people—but I wonder if we are serving different “customers.” My library is open to the public, but our mission is to support the scholarly needs of the University community; that is, our students and faculty are our most important users. My digital collections, though, have a more nebulous user base. Web analytics indicate that these collections are being used off campus, but unless we get a reference question, I don\'t have a concrete idea of who those external users are or what needs they may have.\r\n<blockquote>L: This is true for data as well. Making data openly available online means we have less information about our users. We are more in line with public-library patron-privacy policies. “User” is a particularly loaded term for my project right now. So far, our main system users are data providers as opposed to data (re)users. Once our system and metadata mature a bit, we expect to be working with data (re)users as well, but for now we are mostly working with scientists originally gathering and depositing data.</blockquote>\r\nK: How do you talk to your data creators? How do they view their data?\r\n<blockquote>L: From a field-science perspective, there is often a deeply personal connection between a scientist and their data. These scientists fought tooth and nail to get funding to go into the field; they trained a group of people to help them do the data gathering; they worked long hours, often in less-than-ideal conditions, to collect the data they needed. For many researchers, each dataset is an extension of their career and understanding.</blockquote>\r\nK: I’m just starting to get questions about best practices for information management from faculty members on my campus, primarily humanities scholars seeking more effective ways to take, store, search, and organize their notes, and I suspect they feel similarly, although they may not refer to their notes as “data.” Anecdotally, they are most interested in technology as a way to improve their data collection; they seem far less concerned with (and in some cases strongly against) sharing their aggregated data with other scholars. That said, there’s been an explosion of digital humanities research using public or shared data sets (for example, textual analyses using Google’s Ngram viewer). Is this kind of data reuse happening with scientific data?\r\n<blockquote>L: I think scale has to be part of the reuse discussion. Data are reused all the time within the context of an individual researcher or strongly coordinated lab. Researchers who go out into the field regularly build long-term datasets from observations and reuse those “living” datasets over the course of a career, in some cases. In the field sciences, though, this kind of data is really difficult to analyze once you are outside of that personal or lab context. At a larger scale, some data tend to be more homogeneous and collected from the start with reuse in mind. For example, in the Earth sciences, satellite data are regularly reused in many types of research. One of the challenges in data curation is bridging between scales, between domains with complex and heterogeneous data and those with more homogeneous data. There is often a disconnect between researchers who focus on gathering unique observational data and researchers looking to reuse those observations in other research. Data creators don\'t necessarily have the same incentives as data reusers.</blockquote>\r\nK: That’s something I see in my archival work as well. There’s sometimes a disconnect between the information needs of campus departments that create content with archival value versus the departments that use our archival collections most frequently. For example, our public relations office produces wonderful publications and fantastic photographs of the campus, but in their work, photos or documents more than a few years old are no longer valuable. They need fast access to fresh content, so adding detailed descriptions or captions to those files isn’t a good use of their staff time. On the other hand, the alumni office wants to put together slideshows and exhibits for reunions, and to them, being able to search for and access a twenty-year-old photograph of a certain student (or especially a donor) is incredibly important.\r\n\r\n<strong>Roles </strong>\r\n\r\nK: So it seems like we both serve as mediators between creators and end users. What other roles do data curators play?\r\n<blockquote>L: We haven’t yet completely defined all of the components of data curation, nor who should manage each. There aren’t yet clear roles. What is clear though is that data curation can’t be done in a vacuum. To create a useful and usable data ecosystem including infrastructure, expertise, services, and longevity, we need multiple perspectives at the table. Data gathering scientists, data reuse scientists, technologists, documentation experts, administrators, data managers, data organization gurus, access experts, and preservationists all need to be part of the conversation. For now at least, I see data curators as generalists and facilitators. How does this compare to LIS roles?</blockquote>\r\nK: I think our roles really depend on our institutions and the other resources available to scholars. At major research universities, subject librarians and even entire libraries can be subject specialized, but at my (masters-level) institution, I have to wear multiple hats and fill multiple roles. I run the library\'s digital collections, but I also serve as a subject specialist for chemistry, biology, physics, and environmental science; provide information-literacy instruction; and support library initiatives in emerging technologies and digital scholarship. In the course of a single day, I might be teaching students about Google\'s search algorithm, helping a faculty member with Mendeley, describing old photos in our digital collections, and using social media to promote library services and collections.\r\n<blockquote>L: Data Information Literacy is emerging as an extension and adaptation of more traditional Information Literacy programs. Some are saying libraries should engage with this type of instruction, while others suggest that it should come from the departments. What do you think?</blockquote>\r\nK: I\'ve been thinking about data literacy a lot lately, especially considering the high visibility of data analysis during the 2012 presidential campaign. There’s clearly a need to educate end users about data, and I think librarians and departments have a role to play. Like most librarians, I emphasize the importance of evaluation in my information-literacy instruction, but at this point, I worry that I don’t know enough about data to help a student or colleague evaluate or manage it. The advantage of working in a small university is that my department can be somewhat of a one-stop shop for scholarship support, but the downside is that I don\'t have the level of in-depth expertise or experience in each role that my students and faculty might need. For example, as much as I’d like to help my chemistry faculty with their data, I feel like a librarian specializing in chemistry would have a much better understanding of their data-management needs and options.\r\n<blockquote>L: Many people share your concern, but I think the skills and perspective that you and other library and archives experts would bring to the data table would be so valuable. For instance, from a collection-development point of view, the data community could benefit from lessons learned about crafting collection-development policies and keeping them up to date over time. Evaluating data quality is immensely difficult, but a great place to start might be to look at the factors you use to judge quality for collection materials. Deaccessioning is a relatively new but important conversation in the data community. Understanding the value and mechanics of a catalog, and of multiple levels of metadata, is a really valuable skill in the data world as well. We are working on data search and access, and are running into the issues of systems not playing nicely together, differing metadata, and issues with access policies, just like in the library realm. Conversations with researchers about data end up sounding a whole lot like reference interviews. I don’t at all think that you need to have “data” in your title to be qualified to be part of the data discussion. There is so much you and others can add just based on your knowledge of the conceptual and practical LIS realms. The work of data curation is relatively new, I hope we can take the best of all of the information fields and create something even better.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>What\'s Next?</strong>\r\n\r\nK: One of the hardest things about my job is persuading stakeholders to fund and support digital projects with long-term rather than immediate benefits. There are so many competing demands on institutional resources, and the complexity and uncertainty of digital preservation makes it hard for me to articulate how investing time and money now will help us down the road. How do we convince people to value what we do?\r\n<blockquote>L: That is certainly the question for the ages! I think there are big cultural, economic, and political issues that need to be addressed, but that doesn’t mean we should wait around for a societal green light. If we had limitless funds, are we all clear on what we would create? I think that getting our own house in order is a good place to start. Let’s define and clearly articulate our evolving roles, and recognize contributions and potential relationships within our communities and in related groups. I think we still have a ways to go to know how to integrate more with our communities and promote our own value, but this is a learning process, a research process.</blockquote>\r\nK: Char Booth wrote a while back that the “outsider” perspective is one of the most important things librarians bring to the scholarly table. ((Char Booth, “Librarians as  __________: Shapeshifting at the Periphery,” <i>In the Library with the Lead Pipe</i>, July 21, 2010, http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/.)) Our neutrality and distance adds an important perspective to specialized research.\r\n<blockquote>L: The LIS community is not really neutral, though. We’re representing future generations of scholars; essentially, we are arguing for the greater good. The whole of scholarly knowledge is greater than the sum of its individual researcher parts, and we’re the ones trying to bring the pieces together.</blockquote>\r\nKristen and Lynn:\r\n\r\n<em>This conversation on the relationships between libraries, archives, and data curation is still in its early stages. Many of our questions need deeper exploration, and there are many topics (social media, versioning, identifier schemes, repository certification, branding, sustainability, scaling, and more) that we haven’t tackled here. Most importantly, we know there are issues, perspectives, and opportunities outside our areas of expertise (such as data curation in the humanities) that should be brought into the discussion. Far from having the last word, then, we hope instead that we\'ve given all of our librarian, archivist, and data colleagues some common ground from which to kick off your own conversations—we’ll save you a seat at the dinner table!</em>','All in the Family: A Dinner Table Conversation about Libraries, Archives, Data, and Science','','inherit','open','open','','4831-revision-7','','','2013-06-28 19:39:41','2013-06-28 19:39:41','',4831,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4831-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(4947,1,'2013-04-21 20:14:34','2013-04-21 20:14:34','<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/castle-book1.png\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-2008 clear\" title=\"Castle Book\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/castle-book1.png\" alt=\"Castle Book\" width=\"526\" height=\"357\" /></a><span class=\"caption\">Castle Book of Hours #2, use of Rouen. Manuscript, written and illustrated in Rouen, France, mid-15th century. Bryn Mawr College Library.</span>\n\nThe encounter of the person with the object: that is the object of this journal and the focus of this first issue.   This particular object, the <em>Castle Book of Hours #2</em>, a gift to the Bryn Mawr College Library, has been in my hands several times and is now part of an exhibition of objects from the College’s Special Collections.  All of the objects in the exhibition have been in the hands of students and faculty over the years, encountered in classrooms, used in assignments, touched.\n\nHow do people encounter the <em>Castle Book of Hours #2</em>? We get some answer to this question in <a href=\"http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibitions.html\" target=\"_blank\">“Worlds to Discover”</a>, an exhibit in honor of the 125<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Bryn Mawr College. The exhibit features objects that are set off by statements from students and faculty about how the object matters.  With this <em>Book of Hours</em>, faculty member Martha Easton remarks that instead of one page – out of context – when one has this manuscript in one’s hands, one gets a better sense of how this object “might have been used and consumed.” The encounters for Anne Harding, a student at Bryn Mawr, seem to be moving her towards a career that will keep her in touch with objects like these.\n\n<!--[if IE]><object width=\"545\" height=\"349\" id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" classid=\"clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\"><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\"><param name=\"allowNetworking\" value=\"all\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><param name=\"flashVars\" value=\"f=1&#038;autoplay=f&#038;disablebranding=f\"><object id=\"viddlerInner-ab2b7739\"><video id=\"viddlerVideo-ab2b7739\" src=\"//www.viddler.com/file/ab2b7739/html5mobile/\" type=\"video/mp4\" width=\"545\" height=\"307\" poster=\"//www.viddler.com/thumbnail/ab2b7739/\" controls=\"controls\" x-webkit-airplay=\"allow\"></video></object></object><![endif]--> <!--[if !IE]> <!--> <object id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" width=\"545\" height=\"349\" classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\" /><param name=\"allowNetworking\" value=\"all\" /><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" /><param name=\"flashVars\" value=\"f=1&amp;autoplay=f&amp;disablebranding=f\" /><param name=\"src\" value=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\" /><embed id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" width=\"545\" height=\"349\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" src=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\" allowScriptAccess=\"always\" allowNetworking=\"all\" allowFullScreen=\"true\" flashVars=\"f=1&amp;autoplay=f&amp;disablebranding=f\" /><img src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-includes/js/tinymce/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif\" id=\"viddlerInner-ab2b7739\" class=\"mceItemMedia mceItemFlash\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" data-mce-json=\"{\'video\':{},\'params\':{\'src\':null},\'name\':null,\'object_html\':\'&lt;video id=&quot;viddlerVideo-ab2b7739&quot; src=&quot;//www.viddler.com/file/ab2b7739/html5mobile/&quot; type=&quot;video/mp4&quot; width=&quot;545&quot; height=&quot;307&quot; poster=&quot;//www.viddler.com/thumbnail/ab2b7739/&quot; controls=&quot;controls&quot; x-webkit-airplay=&quot;allow&quot;&gt;&lt;/video&gt;\',\'hspace\':null,\'vspace\':null,\'align\':null,\'bgcolor\':null}\"></img></object> <!--<![endif]-->\n\nI want to point to another encounter with this same object.  The teacher of a fifth grade art class, teaching the students to create their own illuminated manuscripts, asked that I bring in examples of illuminated manuscripts, and this was one of two that I brought along.  The fascination to the students was two-fold:  one, was the value of the object – how much was it worth?  This is something that college students ask too, so I say something like – well, as much as maybe a house is worth.  But that fascination was replaced quickly by the issue at hand:  the students had work to do; they were creating their own illumination and they wanted to use and consume this manuscript themselves.  Each of them had an initial letter, the first letter in their first name, to create for their own manuscript.  So the hunt was on, and luckily for them and for me, each of those letters could be found in the pages of this manuscript. Unlike Easton and Harding, the fifth graders themselves consumed the manuscripts, as opposed to getting the sense of how the manuscript was consumed.  They served as a reminder of the many ways that objects now in special collections speak to those who encounter them, from the first users of the Castle Book of Hours #2 to 21st-century students of all ages.','Same Object, Different Audiences','The encounter of the person with the object: that is the object of this journal and the focus of this first issue.   This particular object, the Castle Book of Hours #2, a gift to the Bryn Mawr College Library, has been in my hands several times and is now part of an exhibition of objects from the College’s Special Collections.  All of the objects in the exhibition have been in the hands of students and faculty over the years, encountered in classrooms, used in assignments, touched.','inherit','open','open','','222-revision-4','','','2013-04-21 20:14:34','2013-04-21 20:14:34','',222,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/222-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4948,1,'2013-07-01 02:19:42','2013-07-01 02:19:42','<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/castle-book1.png\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-2008 clear\" title=\"Castle Book\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/castle-book1.png\" alt=\"Castle Book\" width=\"526\" height=\"357\" /></a><span class=\"caption\">Castle Book of Hours #2, use of Rouen. Manuscript, written and illustrated in Rouen, France, mid-15th century. Bryn Mawr College Library.</span>\r\n\r\nThe encounter of the person with the object: that is the object of this journal and the focus of this first issue.   This particular object, the <em>Castle Book of Hours #2</em>, a gift to the Bryn Mawr College Library, has been in my hands several times and is now part of an exhibition of objects from the College’s Special Collections.  All of the objects in the exhibition have been in the hands of students and faculty over the years, encountered in classrooms, used in assignments, touched.\r\n\r\nHow do people encounter the <em>Castle Book of Hours #2</em>? We get some answer to this question in <a href=\"http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibitions.html\" target=\"_blank\">“Worlds to Discover”</a>, an exhibit in honor of the 125<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Bryn Mawr College. The exhibit features objects that are set off by statements from students and faculty about how the object matters.  With this <em>Book of Hours</em>, faculty member Martha Easton remarks that instead of one page – out of context – when one has this manuscript in one’s hands, one gets a better sense of how this object “might have been used and consumed.” The encounters for Anne Harding, a student at Bryn Mawr, seem to be moving her towards a career that will keep her in touch with objects like these.\r\n\r\n<!--[if IE]><object width=\"545\" height=\"349\" id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" classid=\"clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\"><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\"><param name=\"allowNetworking\" value=\"all\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><param name=\"flashVars\" value=\"f=1&#038;autoplay=f&#038;disablebranding=f\"><object id=\"viddlerInner-ab2b7739\"><video id=\"viddlerVideo-ab2b7739\" src=\"//www.viddler.com/file/ab2b7739/html5mobile/\" type=\"video/mp4\" width=\"545\" height=\"307\" poster=\"//www.viddler.com/thumbnail/ab2b7739/\" controls=\"controls\" x-webkit-airplay=\"allow\"></video></object></object><![endif]--> <!--[if !IE]> <!--> <object id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" width=\"545\" height=\"349\" classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\" /><param name=\"allowNetworking\" value=\"all\" /><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" /><param name=\"flashVars\" value=\"f=1&amp;autoplay=f&amp;disablebranding=f\" /><param name=\"src\" value=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\" /><embed id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" width=\"545\" height=\"349\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" src=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\" allowScriptAccess=\"always\" allowNetworking=\"all\" allowFullScreen=\"true\" flashVars=\"f=1&amp;autoplay=f&amp;disablebranding=f\" /><img src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-includes/js/tinymce/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif\" id=\"viddlerInner-ab2b7739\" class=\"mceItemMedia mceItemFlash\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" data-mce-json=\"{\'video\':{},\'params\':{\'src\':null},\'name\':null,\'object_html\':\'&lt;video id=&quot;viddlerVideo-ab2b7739&quot; src=&quot;//www.viddler.com/file/ab2b7739/html5mobile/&quot; type=&quot;video/mp4&quot; width=&quot;545&quot; height=&quot;307&quot; poster=&quot;//www.viddler.com/thumbnail/ab2b7739/&quot; controls=&quot;controls&quot; x-webkit-airplay=&quot;allow&quot;&gt;&lt;/video&gt;\',\'hspace\':null,\'vspace\':null,\'align\':null,\'bgcolor\':null}\"></img></object> <!--<![endif]-->\r\n\r\nI want to point to another encounter with this same object.  The teacher of a fifth grade art class, teaching the students to create their own illuminated manuscripts, asked that I bring in examples of illuminated manuscripts, and this was one of two that I brought along.  The fascination to the students was two-fold:  one, was the value of the object – how much was it worth?  This is something that college students ask too, so I say something like – well, as much as maybe a house is worth.  But that fascination was replaced quickly by the issue at hand:  the students had work to do; they were creating their own illumination and they wanted to use and consume this manuscript themselves.  Each of them had an initial letter, the first letter in their first name, to create for their own manuscript.  So the hunt was on, and luckily for them and for me, each of those letters could be found in the pages of this manuscript. Unlike Easton and Harding, the fifth graders themselves consumed the manuscripts, as opposed to getting the sense of how the manuscript was consumed.  They served as a reminder of the many ways that objects now in special collections speak to those who encounter them, from the first users of the Castle Book of Hours #2 to 21st-century students of all ages.','Same Object, Different Audiences','The encounter of the person with the object: that is the object of this journal and the focus of this first issue.   This particular object, the Castle Book of Hours #2, a gift to the Bryn Mawr College Library, has been in my hands several times and is now part of an exhibition of objects from the College’s Special Collections.  All of the objects in the exhibition have been in the hands of students and faculty over the years, encountered in classrooms, used in assignments, touched.','inherit','open','open','','222-revision-5','','','2013-07-01 02:19:42','2013-07-01 02:19:42','',222,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/222-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(4949,1,'2013-07-01 02:20:18','2013-07-01 02:20:18','<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/castle-book1.png\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-2008 clear\" title=\"Castle Book\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/castle-book1.png\" alt=\"Castle Book\" width=\"526\" height=\"357\" /></a><span class=\"caption\">Castle Book of Hours #2, use of Rouen. Manuscript, written and illustrated in Rouen, France, mid-15th century. Bryn Mawr College Library.</span>\r\n\r\nThe encounter of the person with the object: that is the object of this journal and the focus of this first issue.   This particular object, the <em>Castle Book of Hours #2</em>, a gift to the Bryn Mawr College Library, has been in my hands several times and is now part of an exhibition of objects from the College’s Special Collections.  All of the objects in the exhibition have been in the hands of students and faculty over the years, encountered in classrooms, used in assignments, touched.\r\n\r\nHow do people encounter the <em>Castle Book of Hours #2</em>? We get some answer to this question in <a href=\"http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibitions.html\" target=\"_blank\">“Worlds to Discover”</a>, an exhibit in honor of the 125<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Bryn Mawr College. The exhibit features objects that are set off by statements from students and faculty about how the object matters.  With this <em>Book of Hours</em>, faculty member Martha Easton remarks that instead of one page – out of context – when one has this manuscript in one’s hands, one gets a better sense of how this object “might have been used and consumed.” The encounters for Anne Harding, a student at Bryn Mawr, seem to be moving her towards a career that will keep her in touch with objects like these.\r\n\r\n<!--[if IE]><object width=\"545\" height=\"349\" id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" classid=\"clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\"><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\"><param name=\"allowNetworking\" value=\"all\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><param name=\"flashVars\" value=\"f=1&#038;autoplay=f&#038;disablebranding=f\"><object id=\"viddlerInner-ab2b7739\"><video id=\"viddlerVideo-ab2b7739\" src=\"//www.viddler.com/file/ab2b7739/html5mobile/\" type=\"video/mp4\" width=\"545\" height=\"307\" poster=\"//www.viddler.com/thumbnail/ab2b7739/\" controls=\"controls\" x-webkit-airplay=\"allow\"></video></object></object><![endif]--> <!--[if !IE]> <!--> <object id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" width=\"545\" height=\"349\" classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\" /><param name=\"allowNetworking\" value=\"all\" /><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" /><param name=\"flashVars\" value=\"f=1&amp;autoplay=f&amp;disablebranding=f\" /><param name=\"src\" value=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\" /><embed id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" width=\"545\" height=\"349\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" src=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\" allowScriptAccess=\"always\" allowNetworking=\"all\" allowFullScreen=\"true\" flashVars=\"f=1&amp;autoplay=f&amp;disablebranding=f\" /><img src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-includes/js/tinymce/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif\" id=\"viddlerInner-ab2b7739\" class=\"mceItemMedia mceItemFlash\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" data-mce-json=\"{\'video\':{},\'params\':{\'src\':null},\'name\':null,\'object_html\':\'&lt;video id=&quot;viddlerVideo-ab2b7739&quot; src=&quot;//www.viddler.com/file/ab2b7739/html5mobile/&quot; type=&quot;video/mp4&quot; width=&quot;545&quot; height=&quot;307&quot; poster=&quot;//www.viddler.com/thumbnail/ab2b7739/&quot; controls=&quot;controls&quot; x-webkit-airplay=&quot;allow&quot;&gt;&lt;/video&gt;\',\'hspace\':null,\'vspace\':null,\'align\':null,\'bgcolor\':null}\"></img></object> <!--<![endif]-->\r\n\r\nI want to point to another encounter with this same object.  The teacher of a fifth grade art class, teaching the students to create their own illuminated manuscripts, asked that I bring in examples of illuminated manuscripts, and this was one of two that I brought along.  The fascination to the students was two-fold:  one, was the value of the object – how much was it worth?  This is something that college students ask too, so I say something like – well, as much as maybe a house is worth.  But that fascination was replaced quickly by the issue at hand:  the students had work to do; they were creating their own illumination and they wanted to use and consume this manuscript themselves.  Each of them had an initial letter, the first letter in their first name, to create for their own manuscript.  So the hunt was on, and luckily for them and for me, each of those letters could be found in the pages of this manuscript. Unlike Easton and Harding, the fifth graders themselves consumed the manuscripts, as opposed to getting the sense of how the manuscript was consumed.  They served as a reminder of the many ways that objects now in special collections speak to those who encounter them, from the first users of the Castle Book of Hours #2 to 21st-century students of all ages.','Same Object, Different Audiences','The encounter of the person with the object: that is the object of this journal and the focus of this first issue.   This particular object, the Castle Book of Hours #2, a gift to the Bryn Mawr College Library, has been in my hands several times and is now part of an exhibition of objects from the College’s Special Collections.  All of the objects in the exhibition have been in the hands of students and faculty over the years, encountered in classrooms, used in assignments, touched.','inherit','open','open','','222-revision-6','','','2013-07-01 02:20:18','2013-07-01 02:20:18','',222,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/222-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4951,1,'2013-07-01 02:27:37','2013-07-01 02:27:37','<em>Based on our experiences in the academic library, archives, and data curation communities, we present an informal discussion of the relationships between these branches of information science. In this conversational exchange, we decipher concepts of data curation for librarians and archivists while also translating library and archival theory and tradition for the data environment. Beginning with basic questions about the day-to-day realities of managing scientific data in comparison to digital library collections, we discuss roles and practices, seeking both to identify common goals and functions as well as to explore where and how our cultures diverge. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and together our fields support the diverse and ever-changing needs of researchers and information consumers in distinct but complementary ways. </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong>Seeing a Family Resemblence</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Kristen: In 2006, when I decided to go to library school to be an archivist, Lynn was working at Scripps Institution of Oceanography as an information manager. I wasn’t totally clear on what her job was, but I knew it involved data. The first time one of my library school professors brought up “metadata” in class I got excited: “Lynn always talks about metadata!” Since I took my position as Digital Services Librarian at the University of Scranton in 2008, I have come across more and more data issues in both the archival side of my job (digital collections) and in the librarian side of my job (supporting digital scholarship). I started calling Lynn for help.</p>\r\n\r\n<blockquote>Lynn: When I started library school, one of the most exciting aspects for me was learning about this mature, sophisticated ecosystem that already existed for gathering, describing, categorizing, and managing information. There was a system of roles, infrastructure, services, and expertise that conceptually mapped so well to the data world. Kristen would send me archives articles that really resonated with my data issues. It became clear that our respective realms of archives, libraries, and data are fundamentally linked.</blockquote>\r\nK: We quickly noticed, though, that we often have different philosophies about information management and that we tend to use different vocabulary to describe what we do. As we started to untangle the complex relationships between archives, libraries, and data, we found value in each other’s knowledge and expertise.\r\n<blockquote>L: I see data curation as a discipline that cuts across the Library and Information Sciences field. Data curation combines skills from librarianship, archives, information literacy, metadata, technical services, and many other areas. By identifying and articulating similarities and differences between data curation and recognized aspects of LIS, we can plan better for more integrated systems, services, and roles.</blockquote>\r\nK: One of the common (though admittedly simplistic) distinctions drawn between archivists and librarians is a difference in how we prioritize our goals. Both professions are interested in information access and preservation, but librarians prioritize immediate, affordable access while archivists prioritize long-term preservation. Where does data curation fit in? Do your goals as a curator of scientific data differ from the goals of librarians and archivists?\r\n<blockquote>L: The broad goal of data curation is to support scientific research through enabling long-term reuse of data. On the ground, that means data curators work across multiple levels: from defining and supporting strategic metadata creation early in the research cycle, through documentation about research processing, to capturing research “products” and preserving them for reuse. It seems like this is a blend between library and archives goals with support services, immediate access, and preservation all included in data curation. Given that we share the same ultimate goal of making information accessible now and into the future, I think the data community can learn a lot from both the archives and library communities.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Containers, Content, and Context</strong>\r\n\r\nK: Likewise, I think archivists and librarians have a lot to learn from data curators. For starters, I’m not sure I understand what “data” curation really is. When I think “data,” I think of numbers in a spreadsheet. Beyond that, I don’t have a good mental picture of what data looks like.\r\n<blockquote>L: A good working definition of “data” for LIS professionals is “workable/usable chunks of content,” whether values in a printed journal article table, numbers in a spreadsheet, pixels in an image, etc. For example, you can think of a digital humanities scholar viewing the text inside a book as data. But I think your question hints at a broader difference between library and data work—data are the content, libraries are usually more interested with the container. I think it\'s a granularity issue.</blockquote>\r\nK: That\'s a good point. At my library, the way we manage our collections, and the way that users access our collections, does center on physical or digital “containers.” Our books are stored in a different place than our microfilm, for example, and our streaming media is stored in a different place than the text and image files in my digital collections. I think some of my confusion about data curation stems from not understanding what kind of “container” your data is in. What formats do data usually come in? What kinds of files do data curators need to manage and preserve?\r\n<blockquote>L: Data come in many containers, from different types of files to databases and paper logbooks. In some ways we need to manage and preserve all of them. From a scientific perspective, though, it doesn’t matter what kind of container is used, so we have a lot more flexibility in moving content around. There are exceptions to this rule, but in general it is the content—the measurements, observations, model predictions, and values, for instance—that is important.</blockquote>\r\nK: Doesn\'t format play a role in long-term access, though? For archivists, format is a major concern in digital preservation planning. We worry about how to preserve different kinds of files over time in the face of software and hardware obsolescence.\r\n<blockquote>L: In data, the bigger question is “what functionality do we need to offer?” Long-term format decisions will lean heavily on that answer. While we absolutely need to preserve access and are looking for strategies for avoiding obsolescence, the primary aim of scientific data curation is to enable future use of the data, not necessarily to enable access to the original scientist’s files. Carrying forward the data format and container is not nearly as crucial as capturing the data context (for example, the conditions under which the data were collected).</blockquote>\r\nK: Preserving context is a priority for archivists as well, but it seems like we have different understandings of what “context” is or should be. Archivists want to be able to ensure that future users can access the content of archival documents, but we also want to preserve the “look and feel” of the information environment in which the file was created. To me, file format is a part of the context in which a record was created.\r\n<blockquote>L: There is a trade-off here for scientific data; sometimes context can get in the way. For instance, we often see Excel files with multiple tables per sheet, color-coded cells, and notes mixed with values. While all of that formatting can show the process used by the original researcher and may be valuable to a science historian, other researchers looking to reuse the data need to manually sift through the file to find the content they need.</blockquote>\r\nK: That’s an interesting difference from traditional archival practice. In order to capture the context in which records were created, archivists typically organize our collections based on provenance (what office or person they came from), and we usually maintain original order, even if that makes individual documents more difficult to find—that is, even if that makes the collection less functional or less accessible to the end user. That said, one of the things I like about working with digitized materials is that I have more freedom with arrangement. I can organize my digital collections in a more accessible way, noting in the metadata how the original, physical documents are arranged. What aspects of context do you try to capture for your data?\r\n<blockquote>L: With scientific data, the scientist and the scientist’s intent are important aspects of the data context. For field scientists, they (and sometimes only they) know what actually happened out in the field, and what oddities might emerge during data processing (for example, “That reflectance value looks strange. Remember on that cruise, though, the captain was new to the ship and wasn’t very good at keeping the boat steady while we deployed? It might be a shadow signature”). Maybe the researcher switched their sampling plan partway through the study because their experience told them that the really interesting thing was happening slightly outside of the planned area. Their data are a reflection of all of the physical, intellectual, and instinctual decisions made, capturing parts of the resulting experience. All of that context is often essential to interpreting the data, but it can’t be easily included in metadata. Our standards aren’t yet mature enough to be able to communicate to an end user the context in which the data were created, and data creators don’t have the habit of including that information in documentation.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Metadata </strong>\r\n\r\nK: So it seems like both data curators and digital archivists face a common challenge of creating and capturing complex, contextual metadata in systematic, effective, and (hopefully!) standardized ways.\r\n<blockquote>L: Absolutely! I would add that metadata need to be useful, sharable, and discoverable, along with machine-, human-, and increasingly browser- and search engine-readable. I would definitely consider metadata to be an area needing more research.</blockquote>\r\nK: While we’re talking about metadata, are there “levels” of metadata in data curation? That is, archivists can describe information at the collection level, series level, item level, and even page level, but librarians don’t usually think this way—it’s more like one object (for example, one book), one bibliographic record.\r\n<blockquote>L: Levels are a hugely important part of data in the sciences. Data need description at multiple levels, though our levels and terminology are not yet well defined. Even the term “dataset” is poorly defined; the content and nature of datasets vary widely. One dataset might contain one type of data from a single field survey, while another might aggregate years of field studies with multiple data types into a dataset. “Collection,” “project,” “study,” “file,” “record,” and “granule” are other important terms relating to levels, though there is still discussion about what these mean. Despite the lack of consensus in language, data curators are ideally collecting metadata at many different levels. There is always a struggle to capture as much metadata as possible given limited resources and an evolving understanding of what metadata we actually need.</blockquote>\r\nK: There’s a similar tension between quantity and quality in digital collections. Given limited resources, is it better to make more content available more quickly, with less metadata? Or is deep and detailed metadata more valuable to potential users, even if it means that it takes us longer to publish new content? A well-known paper by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner, called “<a title=\"More Product, Less Process\" href=\"http://archivists.metapress.com/content/c741823776k65863/fulltext.pdf\">More Product, Less Process</a>,” [PDF] ((Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” <i>American Archivist</i> 68 (2005): 208-63.)) encouraged archivists to decrease the time they spent processing physical collections in order to maximize the quantity of archival resources available to the public, at the expense of in-depth description and intellectual control. The idea of “more product, less process” (MPLP) is often applied to digital collections as well as traditional archives. ((See, for example, Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” <i>American Archivist</i> 73 (2010): 175-203.)) On a practical level, I determine how deeply we’ll describe a collection based on how much value I think that description will add for our users. What kind of metadata do users tend to look for in the data world?\r\n<blockquote>L: We keep metadata about a project (very high level, related to funding awards or research theme) for contextual information and for discovery, since many researchers know about projects in their fields; however, that project-level description doesn’t really help with understanding the data themselves. So we use metadata at the “dataset” level to provide context for the actual data, to help researchers who aren’t familiar with the project find what they are looking for, and to give credit to the data creators. Beyond this discovery level, metadata creation and prioritization get tricky; usability requirements start to depend on what the data (re)user is trying to do, and domain knowledge starts to become more and more helpful. I add the “(re)” here to point out that especially observational data available online have often already been used; acknowledging the original intent and use of the data is important when trying to carry forward data context.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>Creators and Users</strong>\r\n\r\nK: That brings us to the idea of “users.” All three fields are service-oriented—we want to help people—but I wonder if we are serving different “customers.” My library is open to the public, but our mission is to support the scholarly needs of the University community; that is, our students and faculty are our most important users. My digital collections, though, have a more nebulous user base. Web analytics indicate that these collections are being used off campus, but unless we get a reference question, I don\'t have a concrete idea of who those external users are or what needs they may have.\r\n<blockquote>L: This is true for data as well. Making data openly available online means we have less information about our users. We are more in line with public-library patron-privacy policies. “User” is a particularly loaded term for my project right now. So far, our main system users are data providers as opposed to data (re)users. Once our system and metadata mature a bit, we expect to be working with data (re)users as well, but for now we are mostly working with scientists originally gathering and depositing data.</blockquote>\r\nK: How do you talk to your data creators? How do they view their data?\r\n<blockquote>L: From a field-science perspective, there is often a deeply personal connection between a scientist and their data. These scientists fought tooth and nail to get funding to go into the field; they trained a group of people to help them do the data gathering; they worked long hours, often in less-than-ideal conditions, to collect the data they needed. For many researchers, each dataset is an extension of their career and understanding.</blockquote>\r\nK: I’m just starting to get questions about best practices for information management from faculty members on my campus, primarily humanities scholars seeking more effective ways to take, store, search, and organize their notes, and I suspect they feel similarly, although they may not refer to their notes as “data.” Anecdotally, they are most interested in technology as a way to improve their data collection; they seem far less concerned with (and in some cases strongly against) sharing their aggregated data with other scholars. That said, there’s been an explosion of digital humanities research using public or shared data sets (for example, textual analyses using Google’s Ngram viewer). Is this kind of data reuse happening with scientific data?\r\n<blockquote>L: I think scale has to be part of the reuse discussion. Data are reused all the time within the context of an individual researcher or strongly coordinated lab. Researchers who go out into the field regularly build long-term datasets from observations and reuse those “living” datasets over the course of a career, in some cases. In the field sciences, though, this kind of data is really difficult to analyze once you are outside of that personal or lab context. At a larger scale, some data tend to be more homogeneous and collected from the start with reuse in mind. For example, in the Earth sciences, satellite data are regularly reused in many types of research. One of the challenges in data curation is bridging between scales, between domains with complex and heterogeneous data and those with more homogeneous data. There is often a disconnect between researchers who focus on gathering unique observational data and researchers looking to reuse those observations in other research. Data creators don\'t necessarily have the same incentives as data reusers.</blockquote>\r\nK: That’s something I see in my archival work as well. There’s sometimes a disconnect between the information needs of campus departments that create content with archival value versus the departments that use our archival collections most frequently. For example, our public relations office produces wonderful publications and fantastic photographs of the campus, but in their work, photos or documents more than a few years old are no longer valuable. They need fast access to fresh content, so adding detailed descriptions or captions to those files isn’t a good use of their staff time. On the other hand, the alumni office wants to put together slideshows and exhibits for reunions, and to them, being able to search for and access a twenty-year-old photograph of a certain student (or especially a donor) is incredibly important.\r\n\r\n<strong>Roles </strong>\r\n\r\nK: So it seems like we both serve as mediators between creators and end users. What other roles do data curators play?\r\n<blockquote>L: We haven’t yet completely defined all of the components of data curation, nor who should manage each. There aren’t yet clear roles. What is clear though is that data curation can’t be done in a vacuum. To create a useful and usable data ecosystem including infrastructure, expertise, services, and longevity, we need multiple perspectives at the table. Data gathering scientists, data reuse scientists, technologists, documentation experts, administrators, data managers, data organization gurus, access experts, and preservationists all need to be part of the conversation. For now at least, I see data curators as generalists and facilitators. How does this compare to LIS roles?</blockquote>\r\nK: I think our roles really depend on our institutions and the other resources available to scholars. At major research universities, subject librarians and even entire libraries can be subject specialized, but at my (masters-level) institution, I have to wear multiple hats and fill multiple roles. I run the library\'s digital collections, but I also serve as a subject specialist for chemistry, biology, physics, and environmental science; provide information-literacy instruction; and support library initiatives in emerging technologies and digital scholarship. In the course of a single day, I might be teaching students about Google\'s search algorithm, helping a faculty member with Mendeley, describing old photos in our digital collections, and using social media to promote library services and collections.\r\n<blockquote>L: Data Information Literacy is emerging as an extension and adaptation of more traditional Information Literacy programs. Some are saying libraries should engage with this type of instruction, while others suggest that it should come from the departments. What do you think?</blockquote>\r\nK: I\'ve been thinking about data literacy a lot lately, especially considering the high visibility of data analysis during the 2012 presidential campaign. There’s clearly a need to educate end users about data, and I think librarians and departments have a role to play. Like most librarians, I emphasize the importance of evaluation in my information-literacy instruction, but at this point, I worry that I don’t know enough about data to help a student or colleague evaluate or manage it. The advantage of working in a small university is that my department can be somewhat of a one-stop shop for scholarship support, but the downside is that I don\'t have the level of in-depth expertise or experience in each role that my students and faculty might need. For example, as much as I’d like to help my chemistry faculty with their data, I feel like a librarian specializing in chemistry would have a much better understanding of their data-management needs and options.\r\n<blockquote>L: Many people share your concern, but I think the skills and perspective that you and other library and archives experts would bring to the data table would be so valuable. For instance, from a collection-development point of view, the data community could benefit from lessons learned about crafting collection-development policies and keeping them up to date over time. Evaluating data quality is immensely difficult, but a great place to start might be to look at the factors you use to judge quality for collection materials. Deaccessioning is a relatively new but important conversation in the data community. Understanding the value and mechanics of a catalog, and of multiple levels of metadata, is a really valuable skill in the data world as well. We are working on data search and access, and are running into the issues of systems not playing nicely together, differing metadata, and issues with access policies, just like in the library realm. Conversations with researchers about data end up sounding a whole lot like reference interviews. I don’t at all think that you need to have “data” in your title to be qualified to be part of the data discussion. There is so much you and others can add just based on your knowledge of the conceptual and practical LIS realms. The work of data curation is relatively new, I hope we can take the best of all of the information fields and create something even better.</blockquote>\r\n<strong>What\'s Next?</strong>\r\n\r\nK: One of the hardest things about my job is persuading stakeholders to fund and support digital projects with long-term rather than immediate benefits. There are so many competing demands on institutional resources, and the complexity and uncertainty of digital preservation makes it hard for me to articulate how investing time and money now will help us down the road. How do we convince people to value what we do?\r\n<blockquote>L: That is certainly the question for the ages! I think there are big cultural, economic, and political issues that need to be addressed, but that doesn’t mean we should wait around for a societal green light. If we had limitless funds, are we all clear on what we would create? I think that getting our own house in order is a good place to start. Let’s define and clearly articulate our evolving roles, and recognize contributions and potential relationships within our communities and in related groups. I think we still have a ways to go to know how to integrate more with our communities and promote our own value, but this is a learning process, a research process.</blockquote>\r\nK: Char Booth wrote a while back that the “outsider” perspective is one of the most important things librarians bring to the scholarly table. ((Char Booth, “Librarians as  __________: Shapeshifting at the Periphery,” <i>In the Library with the Lead Pipe</i>, July 21, 2010, http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/.)) Our neutrality and distance adds an important perspective to specialized research.\r\n<blockquote>L: The LIS community is not really neutral, though. We’re representing future generations of scholars; essentially, we are arguing for the greater good. The whole of scholarly knowledge is greater than the sum of its individual researcher parts, and we’re the ones trying to bring the pieces together.</blockquote>\r\nKristen and Lynn:\r\n\r\n<em>This conversation on the relationships between libraries, archives, and data curation is still in its early stages. Many of our questions need deeper exploration, and there are many topics (social media, versioning, identifier schemes, repository certification, branding, sustainability, scaling, and more) that we haven’t tackled here. Most importantly, we know there are issues, perspectives, and opportunities outside our areas of expertise (such as data curation in the humanities) that should be brought into the discussion. Far from having the last word, then, we hope instead that we\'ve given all of our librarian, archivist, and data colleagues some common ground from which to kick off your own conversations—we’ll save you a seat at the dinner table!</em>','All in the Family: A Dinner Table Conversation about Libraries, Archives, Data, and Science','','inherit','open','open','','4831-revision-8','','','2013-07-01 02:27:37','2013-07-01 02:27:37','',4831,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4831-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(4952,1,'2013-06-28 19:41:35','2013-06-28 19:41:35','<b>Abstract</b>\r\n\r\nIncreased interest in large-scale, publicly accessible data collections has made data curation critical to the management, preservation, and improvement of research data in the social and natural sciences, as well as the humanities. This paper explicates an approach to data curation education that integrates traditional notions of curation with principles and expertise from library, archival, and computer science. We begin by tracing the emergence of data curation as both a concept and a field of practice related to, but distinct from, both digital curation and data stewardship. This historical account, while far from definitive, considers perspectives from both the sciences and the humanities. Alongside traditional LIS and archival science practices, unique aspects of curation have informed our concept of “purposeful work” with data and, in turn, our pedagogical approach to data curation for the sciences and the humanities.\r\n\r\n<b>The Genesis of <i>Data Curation</i></b>\r\n\r\nNatural history museums have long been devoted to the curation of scientific data in the form of physical specimens. Their curatorial roles and responsibilities help explain how the term <i>curation</i> came to stand for the current conception of the management and preservation of digital research data. Moreover, their focus on making data usable for research over the long term is tightly aligned with our approach to data curation education, to be discussed below, which has been driven by the principle of “purposeful curation.” ((Carole Palmer, Allen Renear, and Melissa Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data,” <i>Proceedings of the 4th International Digital Curation Conference, </i>2008.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn1\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nBefore scholarly practices shifted to a digital realm or a big data paradigm, natural history museums were extending their concept of curation in anticipation of the demand for the management and enhancement of digital data. In particular, William Fry, a curator at the British Museum of Natural History, made very early observations about the need to optimize data collections for research in a digital environment. His 1965 <i>Nature </i>article, “Methods in Taxonomy,” asserts, “what is urgently needed, if numerical taxonomy is to become an accepted tool of routine identification and classification, is proof that the labour of collecting the vast quantities of data required for the statistics is rewarded by greatly increased usefulness of the results.” ((William G. Fry, “Methods in Taxonomy,” <i>Nature</i> 207 (1965): 246, doi:10.1038/207245a0.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn2\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nFry questioned how “mathematical and computational” methods would affect the practices of curators and collection managers, forecasting the kinds of concerns we hear today about the data deluge: “While collections, the items of which can be counted in hundreds, can be adequately controlled and used by means of written guides and indices, these time-honoured methods cannot be efficient where collections must be numbered in tens or hundreds of thousands.” ((Ibid.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn3\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nThe notion of <i>curation</i> in relation to digital research data became more common in the 1990s, although most of what we now think of as <i>data curation </i>was often labeled <i>informatics </i>in both the humanities and the sciences. A 1994 Department of Energy (DOE) report on genome informatics is notable in its attention to data access and management, as well as its description of “database curators” in both laboratories and natural history museums. However, the first published application of the term <i>data curation</i> may be found in Diane Zorich’s 1995 paper on future collections management in <i>Museum Management and Curatorship</i>. She elaborates on the concept of database curators from the 1994 DOE report, arguing for an entirely new field of information work in museums, libraries, and traditional scientific laboratory settings:\r\n<blockquote>Data sets need to be examined for consistency, long-term quality and relevance over time, and new sources of data must be identified and assessed. Changes or updates to data require authentication and verification. Tools which support object databases, such as authority lists, thesauri, data dictionaries and other documentation resources, need to be maintained, updated and distributed at regular intervals, while data security and access must be considered. All these concerns constitute the discipline of data curation. ((Diane M. Zorich, \"Data management: Managing electronic information: Data curation in museums,\" <i>Museum Management and Curatorship</i> 14, no. 4 (1995): 431.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn4\">\r\n</a></blockquote>\r\nIn the humanities and cultural heritage communities, the curation of digital research data has been an important topic since at least the late 1980s. Again, the museum community, especially those engaged with the early web, was at the center of curation discourse. In 1987, in the first issue of <i>Archival Informatics Newsletter</i> (the external house organ for David Bearman’s company), Bearman explicitly drew the link between informatics as “an emerging usage in biomedicine” and “a philosophy of looking at the cultural information missions of archives and museums.” ((David Bearman, “What Are/Is Informatics?” <i>Archival Informatics Newsletter</i> (1987): 8.)) In 1993, the second International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM) featured a paper by Susan Hockey, then Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) at Rutgers and Princeton Universities, reporting on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard for machine-readable texts initiated that year. Hockey explains the significance of efforts like the TEI to the goals of those working on “museum documentation and information handling systems,” in part because of the need for “the usefulness, development and longevity of . . . data.” ((Susan Hockey, “Developing Text Standards,” <i>Selected papers from the second International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, Cambridge, England</i> (1993): 255, <a href=\"http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim93/hockey.pdf\">http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim93/hockey.pdf</a>.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn6\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nIn the same year that Zorich’s article coined the term “data curation,” the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) ((Jisc, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus.aspx.)) in the UK helped to establish the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), with the following mission: it “acquires, curates, preserves and provides access to complex digital resources created by or supporting research and teaching in Higher and Further Education and life-long learning.” ((“Interview with Sheila Anderson and Hamish James, AHDS,” <i>Digital Curation Center</i>, accessed May 28, 2013, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/community/interviews/sheila-anderson-and-hamish-james.)) Shortly thereafter the aims of the AHDS were further refined to “collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from scholarly research in the humanities” and to further “develop a generalized and extensible framework for digital resource creation, description, preservation, and location.” ((Daniel Greenstein, “Serving the Arts and Humanities” <i>Ariadne 4</i> (1996), http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/ahds.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn9\">\r\n</a><b></b>\r\n\r\n<b>Diffuse Trajectory in the Humanities</b>\r\n\r\nInitiatives in the humanities, such as the AHDS, were undoubtedly responding to data-curation imperatives similar to those in bioinformatics and other sciences. Clear parallels are the exception, however, in a longer and more discontinuous and diffuse trajectory as the <i>digital humanities</i> progressed. Through 2001, digital research in the humanities was sometimes referred to as humanities informatics, ((J. Unsworth, “A Master’s Degree in Digital Humanities: Part of the Media Studies Program at the University of Virginia,” <i>Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Université Laval, Québec, Canada</i>, 2001,<i> </i><a href=\"http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/laval.html\">http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/laval.html</a>; M. G. Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” <i>ADE Bulletin</i> 150 (2010): 1-7.)) but <i>humanities computing </i>became the more common term for the growing field now known as digital humanities.\r\n\r\nSeveral significant strands of early computational research in humanities computing involved the development of indices, annotated linguistic corpora, and digitally encoded texts—in other words, the preparation, collection, organization, and maintenance of datasets. The widely accepted origin story of the digital humanities as a field centers on Father Roberto Busa’s project, beginning in 1949, to create a concordance to the complete works of Thomas Aquinas. ((Susan Hockey, \"The history of humanities computing,\" <i>A companion to digital humanities</i> (2004): 3-19.)) Busa’s reflection on the genesis of his own work contains an echo of Fry’s call for a curatorial response to “mathematical and computational” methods—with the challenge being the accelerated production of textual data rather than biological specimens. As Busa states, it was clear “that to process texts containing more than ten million words, I had to look for some machinery.” ((Roberto Busa, \"The annals of humanities computing: The index thomisticus,\" <i>Computers and the Humanities</i> 14, no. 2 (1980): 83.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn12\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nTwo decades of work in concordance and index building followed from Busa’s initial achievement, as documented by Dolores M. Burton, ((Cited in Hockey, \"The History of Humanities Computing.”)) and a cognate track of scholarship was devoted to digital dictionaries and corpora, or “electronic lexicography.” ((Harry M. Logan, \"Electronic lexicography,\" <i>Computers and the Humanities</i> 25, no. 6 (1991): 351-61)) Databases became important in the 1980s and 1990s, evidenced by the 1992 inaugural CETH seminar devoted to a project on “Building a Humanities Database.” ((Hockey, Susan. 1992. Humanist 5.0632 CETH Inaugural Seminar 1/17. Retrieved from <a href=\"http://dhhumanist.org/Archives/Virginia/v05/0621.html\">http://dhhumanist.org/Archives/Virginia/v05/0621.html</a>.)) Although less pronounced than with genomics or the natural museum community, the value of databases and their many applications to scholarship were beginning to be recognized.\r\n\r\nCompared to the science realm where curation activities generally remained distinct from research, humanities computing encompassed work with data that was curatorial in nature. The focus of the research community, however, tended toward information retrieval, processing, and publishing more than data curation, even with the earliest case, when Busa referred to the need “to process” data for the Aquinas concordance. There was no comparable modern tradition of stewardship or collection management as with natural history museums. Thus, humanists did not adopt the terminological framework of curation for their work with data. Instead, they applied vocabulary familiar from philology, textual editing, quantitative history, and linguistics. In digital literary studies, the development of methods for digitally encoding textual variants, for example, demonstrates an engagement with curatorial concerns such as provenance but using discipline-specific terms like “diplomatic” transcription strategies, and “editions.” ((For an interesting post hoc alignment, see Allen H. Renear, Molly Dolan, Kevin Trainor, and Melissa H. Cragin, \"Towards a cross‐disciplinary notion of data level in data curation,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 46, no. 1 (2009): 1-8.)) Many of the debates over findings from quantitative history related to the sufficiency or insufficiency of information collections created by scholars pursuing those analyses and to ideas of historical “evidence.” ((William Thomas, \"Computing and the historical imagination,\" <i>A companion to digital humanities</i> (2004): 56-68.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn17\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nWhile the principles and many processes involved in data curation are common across the science and humanities, there are still important differences in how and when curation work is integrated into, or provided as, a service for research. As with other areas of digital scholarship, flagship initiatives are often harbingers of future trends. The highly visible AHDS lost funding in 2008. Since that time, data curation in the humanities returned to being a more diffuse, <i>ad hoc</i> enterprise rather than a part of governmental and institutional research programs, as is more typical in the sciences. ((Tobias Blanke, Mark Hedges, and Stuart Dunn, \"Arts and humanities e-science—Current practices and future challenges,\" <i>Future Generation Computer Systems</i> 25, no. 4 (2009): 474-80.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn18\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Continuity in the Sciences</b>\r\n\r\nThe 2002 paper, “Online Scientific Data Curation, Publication, and Archiving,” by computer scientist Jim Gray and collaborators was instrumental in projecting the term data curation beyond the museum and bioinformatics domains. Gray and his colleagues were developing architecture and storage environments for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in astronomy, and they had also begun writing about a new paradigm of scientific research associated with the emergence of grid computing and a deluge of digital data. ((Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen, \"e-Science and its implications,\" <i>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences</i> 361, no. 1809 (2003): 1809-1825.)) The “fourth paradigm” referred to a new data-driven method for scientific inquiry, where analysis of expertly curated, open access data collections would complement and extend traditional methods like simulation, observation, and theoretical experimentation. ((Jim Gray, Alexander S. Szalay, Ani R. Thakar, Christopher Stoughton, and Jan Vandenberg, \"Online scientific data curation, publication, and archiving,\" <i>Proceedings of SPIE</i> (2002): 103-107; Jim Gray, David T. Liu, Maria Nieto-Santisteban, Alex Szalay, David J. DeWitt, and Gerd Heber, \"Scientific data management in the coming decade,\" <i>ACM SIGMOD Record</i> 34, no. 4 (2005) 34-41; Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Michele Tolle, eds.<i> The fourth paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery</i> (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Research, 2009).)) Data curation, central to this vision, was described as the annotation, preservation, and expert description of datasets, to be carried out, by and large, by librarians. ((Gray et al., \"Online scientific data curation, publication, and archiving.\"))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn21\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nAt the same time, the UK was embracing the potential digital transformation of a national research agenda. What had been called an informatics approach in North America and continental Europe was being labeled <i>eResearch </i>and <i>eScience </i>in the UK. ((Paulien Hogeweg, \"The roots of bioinformatics in theoretical biology,\" <i>PLoS computational biology</i> 7, no. 3 (2011): e1002021.)) A 2003 Jisc-commissioned report on the infrastructures needed to support eScience was one of the first attempts to clarify differences between preservation, archiving, and curation in relation to digital scholarship. ((Philip Lord and Alison Macdonald, <i>e-Science Curation Report: Data curation for e-Science in the UK: an audit to establish requirements for future curation and provision</i> (Digital Archiving Consultancy Limited, 2003).)) The report identifies data curation<i> </i>as the “activity of, managing and promoting the use of data from its point of creation, to ensure it is fit for contemporary purpose, and available for discovery and re-use.” It specifies that “archiving” is needed for “curation,” and “preservation”<i> </i>is “an aspect of archiving,” with all three “involved in managing change over time.” ((Ibid., 12.)) To this day, the distinctions and applications of these three concepts remain imprecise, as is also the case with the terms <i>digital curation</i>, <i>data curation</i>, and <i>data stewardship. </i>In the next section we clarify some of the differences between these terms, their use, and the overall importance in understanding the unique contribution of data curation to science and scholarship.\r\n\r\n<b>Co-Evolution of Digital Curation and Data Curation</b>\r\n\r\nIn the UK, the term digital curation first appeared in a 2001 digital preservation workshop, ((Neil Beagrie, \"Digital curation for science, digital libraries, and individuals,” <i>International Journal of Digital Curation</i> 1 (2006), 3-16.)) but later Neal Beagrie more explicitly defined it in his description of the newly formed Digital Curation Centre (DCC):\r\n<blockquote>The term “digital curation” is increasingly being used for the actions needed to maintain digital research data and other digital materials over their entire lifecycle and over time for current and future generations of users. Implicit in this definition are the processes of digital archiving and digital preservation, but it also includes all the processes needed for good data creation and management, and the capacity to add value to data to generate new sources of information and knowledge. ((Neil Beagrie, “The Digital Curation Centre” <i>Learned Publishing</i> 17, no. 1 (2004): 7-9.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn26\">\r\n</a></blockquote>\r\nThis text is nearly an exact match with the roles outlined in the 2003 Jisc report on <i>data </i>curation—evidence that early on the two concepts were thought of synonymously. Other publications advancing the concept of curation in the UK applied the terms loosely for a number of years. For example, a publication formalizing many of the original 2003 Jisc report recommendations states: “data curation concerns the long-term management of data, from its initial collection to its deposition into an archive.” ((Philip Lord, Alison Macdonald, Liz Lyon, and David Giaretta, \"From data deluge to data curation,\" <i>Proc 3th UK e-Science All Hands Meeting</i> (2004): 371-75.)) The following year, digital curation was more “broadly interpreted” as being “about maintaining and adding value to, a trusted body of digital information for current and future use.” ((David Giaretta, “DCC approach to digital curation, version 1.23,” (white paper, 2005), http://dev.dcc.rl.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Main/DCCApproachToCuration.)) Summarizing many different uses and definitions of digital curation, Yakel’s definition of <i>digital curation</i> is explicit about its place within the information professions. She refers to it as “the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including the preservation, of digital data for future use.” ((Elizabeth Yakel, \"Digital curation,\" <i>OCLC Systems &amp; Services</i> 23, no. 4 (2007): 335-340.))\r\n\r\nYakel’s publication came out the same year that we offered a definition of data curation for the Data Curation Education Program (DCEP), funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The DCEP definition states that data curation is “the active and ongoing management of data throughout its entire lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship.” ((Melissa H. Cragin, P. Bryan Heidorn, Carole L. Palmer, and Linda C. Smith, \"An educational program on data curation,\" <i>American Library Association Conference, Science and Technology Section, </i>Washington, D.C., June 25, 2007. <a href=\"http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3493\">http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3493</a>)) This definition guided development of the Specialization in Data Curation in the GSLIS master’s program and has been applied consistently in DCEP initiatives across the sciences and the humanities, including an annual Summer Institute on Data Curation. The distinction between this definition and those of digital curation is subtle, but important. The focus of data curation is on the “interest and usefulness” of data to scholarship, and this emphasizes the traditional mission of research libraries to provide information to support research and the production of new knowledge.\r\n\r\nDigital curation is, or has become, a term that better accommodates a broader range of digital material. It does not indicate what is being curated nor does it necessarily imply which communities can be purposefully served by curatorial activities. Data curation, on the other hand, relates directly to data that is produced and used by scholarly communities, and it facilitates the reuse and repurposing of data to meet new research needs. As Renear and Muñoz aptly explained in the introduction to a DCEP workshop held at the annual Digital Humanities conference, “Data curation addresses the challenge of maintaining digital information that is produced in the course of research in a manner that preserves its meaning and usefulness as a potential input for further research.” ((Trevor Muñoz and Allen Renear, “Issues in Digital Humanities Data Curation,” (white paper, 2011), http://hdl.handle.net/2142/30852).)) Their emphasis, echoing Cragin et al., is on the scholarship and research enabled by the effective curation of digital data resources. ((Cragin et al., \"An educational program on data curation.\"))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn32\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nAlthough far from complete, this account of the concept of curation provides important contextual background for the next section, where we discuss DCEP’s pedagogical approach to data curation education. As noted above, the principle of “purposeful curation” has been the guiding concept for DCEP and the Specialization in Data Curation. This area focuses exclusively on the curation of research data for scholarly and scientific communities, covering the complex theoretical and practical problems that span eScience and digital humanities.\r\n\r\n<b>Purposeful Work with Data: Beyond Stewardship</b>\r\n\r\nThe “purposeful curation” concept guiding local educational efforts was more formally articulated in response to a paper that asserted, “library science has not demonstrated that it has the theoretical foundations and knowledge base that are capable of providing the framework for handling digital entities.” ((Seamus Ross, \"Digital preservation, archival science and methodological foundations for digital libraries,\" <i>New Review of Information Networking</i> 17, no. 1 (2012): 43-68.)) We argued the contrary: Because of its commitment to the “needs of users to access and use information of value over the long term,” library and information science (LIS) is uniquely positioned to provide the kind of foundation needed for systems and services to manage digital content, especially research data. ((Palmer, Renear, and Cragin, “Purposeful Curation.”)) Further, we explained that our aim in educating data curators was not only to prepare them to build and maintain data collections but also to be responsible for the “associated indexing systems, metadata standards, ontologies, and retrieval systems” that will make it possible for research data to work in concert with existing digital libraries, archives, and repositories. Data curation efforts that embrace this orientation to user communities and their needs within and across disciplines will be equipped to enable innovative research in the sciences and humanities with curated data for “experiments in scientific laboratories, the interpretation of texts by scholars in special collections, the development of exhibits in museums, and other purposeful work with data over time.” ((Ibid.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn35\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nThis conception of curation goes beyond the roles Zorich originally envisioned, ((Zorich, \"Data management.”)) attending to data quality, authentication, security, and associated documentation and tools. It is markedly more active and extends beyond assuring reliable data access, to adding value to support and advance research capabilities. The alignment with the research process is the primary feature that distinguishes data curation from data stewardship. Data stewardship is about management of a shared resource, often embodied by one person or a designated group. ((Karen S. Baker and Lynn Yarmey, \"Data stewardship: Environmental data curation and a web-of-repositories,\" <i>International Journal of Digital Curation</i> 4, no. 2 (2009): 12-27.)) It is clearly essential to the preservation and persistence of robust data collections, but it is a function of “managing data” that implies a less active, fixed maintenance of data over time. ((Cliff Jacobs and Steven J. Worley, “Data Curation in Climate and Weather: Transforming Our Ability to Improve Predictions through Global Knowledge Sharing,” <i>The International Journal of Digital Curation</i> (2009).)) Curation, on the other hand, is concerned with availability <i>and </i>future use of data, including the enhancement, extension, and improvement of data products for reuse beyond a single scholarly community.\r\n\r\nAt the same time, it is essential to recognize that the locally developed processes of data management and stewardship within specific communities are valuable sources of practical knowledge and current practice. The specialization needs to be applicable across domains, and the rate of change in research with digital data is a continual challenge for integrating best practices into the curriculum. Case studies on data management, processing, enhancement, and sharing in scientific and humanities domains have proven to be some of the best material for teaching applied aspects of data curation. Likewise, for repository-based data curation expertise, we depend on our partnerships with national data centers and data services operations in research libraries for coverage of state-of-the-art practices. Increasingly these partners are also serving as hosts for internships and other field experiences for students to work alongside more experienced curators.\r\n\r\n<b>Foundations of Curation</b>\r\n\r\nThe core of the curriculum is a single foundational course grounded in concepts and functions that underpin the curation of research data in practice. The course draws on principles from both LIS and archival science, as well as current trends and practice within research domains and professional work in data repositories. Of the six areas within the core, three are fairly common to information management systems, especially when dealing with digital content: interoperable technical infrastructure, policy development, and intellectual property. The remaining three areas are more closely aligned with key dimensions of LIS expertise and are central to the “purposeful curation” concept: user communities and their information behavior; collection development, management, and research services; and information organization and representation.\r\n\r\nIn the data curation curriculum these dimensions are further refined in relation to problems and practices around research data. The user dimension emphasizes <i>research cultures</i><b> </b>that impact practices of data production and sharing within the system of scholarly communication; the <i>collections</i><b> </b>dimension emphasizes heterogeneous, complex data resources and their potential for reuse across the lifecycle of data, informed by key aspects of archival science; and the <i>representation</i><b> </b>dimension emphasizes the formal characteristics of information objects that carry digital data—with a particular focus on issues of identity, ontology development, and provenance. It is important to note that these dimensions cut across some of the basic areas of knowledge and skills for data curation, such as metadata. That is, while metadata activities are generally associated with representation, effective application of metadata will adequately document aspects of research cultures related to data-collection methods. High-functioning metadata will also be guided by collection issues related to granularity of description, properties of aggregate data products, and meaningful groupings of data for discovery and integration.\r\n\r\n<i>Research cultures: data production, data sharing, and scholarly communication</i>\r\n\r\nThe curation of research data needs to be informed by a detailed understanding of how data are produced and used in conducting research and how these processes fit into the larger context of scholarly communication. As is true with information behavior more generally, data practices vary in important ways across disciplines and sub-disciplines. For example, while there are a number of successful, large-scale open data initiatives, with the Protein Data Bank and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as canonical cases, they are the exception rather than the rule.\r\n\r\nWhile data curation is largely concerned with how data sharing within and across research communities can advance science and scholarship, most researchers do not make their data publically available and most research communities have yet to develop a culture of data sharing. ((Christine L. Borgman, \"The conundrum of sharing research data.\" <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 63, no. 6 (2012): 1059-1078; Anne E. Thessen and David J. Patterson, \"Data issues in the life sciences,\" <i>ZooKeys</i> 150 (2011): 15; Carol Tenopir, Suzie Allard, Kimberly L. Douglass, Arsev Umur Aydinoglu, Lei Wu, Eleanor Read, Maribeth Manoff, and Mike Frame, \"Data sharing by scientists: practices and perceptions,\" <i>PLoS One</i> 6, no. 6 (2011).)) If researchers are willing to share data, the form in which they are willing to release them may provide an easy preservation target, but it may not have the most value for long-term reuse. ((Melissa H. Cragin, Carole L. Palmer, Jacob R. Carlson, and Michael Witt, \"Data sharing, small science and institutional repositories,\" <i>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences</i> 368, no. 1926 (2010): 4023-4038.)) Moreover, actual reuse can be highly dependent on rich contextual metadata provided by data producers. ((Matthew S. Mayernik, Jillian C. Wallis, and Christine L. Borgman, \"Unearthing the infrastructure: Humans and sensors in field-based scientific research,\" <i>Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work</i> (2012); Nicholas M. Weber, Karen S. Baker, Andrea K. Thomer, Tiffany C. Chao, and Carole L. Palmer, \"Value and context in data use: Domain analysis revisited,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1-10; Laura A. Wynholds, Christine L. Borgman,  Jillian C. Wallis, Ashley Sands, and Sharon Traweek, \"Data, Data Use, and Scientific Inquiry: Two Case Studies of Data Practices,\" <i>ACM Press</i> (2012): 19.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nData curation is part of the more global context of scholarly communication in which research libraries, publishers, and scholars have always been the primary actors and stakeholders. As would be expected in this tradition, much attention has been focused on the data associated with specific journals or published papers. To date, there have been a few successful approaches in the “journal—underlying data” archiving model. ((For example, Michael C. Whitlock, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, and Allen J. Moore, \"Data archiving,\" <i>The American Naturalist</i> 175, no. 2 (2010): 145-46.)) However, some of the most challenging curation problems and, arguably, the greatest opportunities lie in our ability to make more basic research data available and interoperable across fields. ((Hanisch, Robert, and Sayeed Choudhury, \"The Data Conservancy: Building a Sustainable System for Interdisciplinary Scientific Data Curation and Preservation,\" <i>Proceedings of the PV 2009 conference, European Space Agency</i> (2009).)) Therefore, data curators should be trained and organizationally positioned to assess accurately which data collections are of value, and in which combinations and states other scholars would find them most useful. Data curators should be able to identify data that have high priority for both their immediate service community and broader domains of interest. This is a unique set of roles and responsibilities for the field of LIS, and it requires educated professionals who understand relationships among research areas and the potential affordances of data for new applications.\r\n\r\n<i>Collections: heterogeneous data, lifecycles, and archives</i>\r\n\r\nCollections have always been central to librarianship and archival science, and their importance will continue as the stores of data grow and become increasingly searchable and browsable. They will be essential units for planning and implementing curation objectives and resources, for supporting research communities, and supporting the reuse and repurposing of data. Variations on the traditional processes of selection, appraisal, and collection management are particularly relevant. ((Angus Whyte and Andrew Wilson, <i>How to Appraise &amp; Select Research Data for Curation</i>, Digital Curation Centre, 2010, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/appraise- select-research-data.)) At various scales, from big data-driven research to smaller data-intensive research, collections have significant properties that provide intellectual, social, and organizational structures for meaningful work with data. ((Carole L. Palmer, Oksana L. Zavalina, and Katrina Fenlon, \"Beyond size and search: Building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 47, no. 1 (2010): 1-10.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nCollections have life cycles of usefulness to scholarship that need to be regulated through curation, including maintenance, migration, and preservation, over time. Moreover, “collection development and collection description are formative curation activities that add value for scholarly inquiry at both the collection and [larger] aggregation levels.” ((Katrina Fenlon, Jacob Jett, and Carole L. Palmer, \"Digital Collections and Aggregations,\" <i>DHCuration Guide</i> (2011), http://guide.dhcuration.org/collections/; Carole Palmer, “Scholarly work and the shaping of digital access,” <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 56, no. 11 (2005).)) As the data accessible in digital environments continue to increase at a rapid pace, sound collection development and description will be essential to presenting data for exploration and discovery. In conjunction with searching capabilities, researchers will greatly benefit from the ability to browse dense and cohesive layers of data sources that not only anticipate researchers’ known needs, but also allow them to effectively navigate through and interpret extensive bodies of openly accessible data.\r\n\r\nCollections will increasingly need to be organized within local institutional repositories and disciplinary data repositories as researchers submit data to comply with funding-agency requirements for data-management planning and data sharing. Curators will be involved as advisors and collaborators in data-management planning, for which knowledge of collections will be key. They will need to identify which versions to retain and share; align with institutional aims and capacity for preservation and access options; assess the fitness of data for deposit in domain or consortia repositories; and advise on intellectual property issues that researchers will face in attempting to comply with these mandates.\r\n\r\nMore generally, collections will be vital to providing reliable access and preservation to data products. Over the long term, we risk ending up with data dumps rather than functional libraries of relevant and usable data assets if we ignore the art of building and organizing data collections for research communities.\r\n\r\n<i>Representation: identity, ontologies, and provenance</i>\r\n\r\nRigorous conceptual analysis of core curatorial notions such as representation, identity, authenticity, reference, and provenance is a distinctive aspect of the DCEP approach to data curation education. Although stewardship requires verifying bit sequences and ensuring that files have not been corrupted, many curation problems turn on much more challenging issues, such as whether two files contain the same data even though they use different representation languages, encodings, or formats. A comparison of bit sequences will provide no assistance here, and so is inadequate for curation that goes beyond stewardship. What is needed is a terminological framework that clarifies these issues, as well as techniques for documentation and confirmation. Getting full value from cyberinfrastructure and computational systems requires that curators be able to refine formal terminology and document the “interpretive frames” that connect reasoning across levels of abstraction. ((David Dubin, Karen Wickett, and Simone Sacchi, “Content, Format, and Interpretation,” <i>Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011</i>. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies 7 (2011), doi:10.4242/BalisageVol7.Dubin01.)) Similarly, precisely documenting the derivation of one dataset from another, critical for both scientific and humanities scholarship, also requires sophisticated conceptual frameworks, tools, and practices. To support curatorial education we are therefore developing general frameworks of concepts and terminology that can be used across disciplines. ((Renear et al., \"Towards a cross‐disciplinary notion of data level in data curation\"; Simone Sacchi, Karen Wickett, Allen Renear, and David Dubin, \"A framework for applying the concept of significant properties to datasets,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 48, no. 1 (2011): 1-10; Karen M. Wickett, Simone Sacchi, David Dubin, and Allen H. Renear, \"Identifying Content and Levels of Representation in Scientific Data,\" <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1-10.))<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">\r\n</a>\r\n\r\nA solid familiarity with semantic technologies (such as the Resource Description Framework [RDF] and the Web Ontology Language [OWL]) is increasingly important as structured terminologies and ontologies for representing scientific and cultural information are now widely used. These data organization strategies are fundamental to data curation: they help ensure that data remains meaningful; they improve software interoperability and data integration; and they support unanticipated use, as well as the mobilization of interdisciplinary approaches. Finally, even the distinctions between publication and data, and reading and analysis, are blurring; new tools are both responding to and driving changes in scholarly publishing and how researchers search, filter, scan, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content from the literature. ((Allen H. Renear and Carole L. Palmer, \"Strategic reading, ontologies, and the future of scientific publishing,\" <i>Science</i> 325, no. 5942 (2009): 828-32.)) For data curators there is no escape from engaging these fundamental issues of representation, identity, ontologies, and provenance.\r\n\r\n<b>Curation Professionals in the Workforce</b>\r\n\r\nA recent analysis of job placements for students completing the Specialization of Data Curation in the GSLIS master’s program at Illinois has been instructive for understanding the types of organizations and positions that need data professionals. The discourse in the field has emphasized that data curation expertise will need to permeate the research process at large, with curation beginning at the initial planning stages of a research project, followed by long-term data management and providing open access data for public use. ((Nicholas M. Weber, Carole L. Palmer, and Tiffany C. Chao, \"Current Trends and Future Directions in Data Curation Research and Education,\" <i>Journal of Web Librarianship</i> 6, no. 4 (2012): 305-20.)) Interestingly, our placement data show that curation professionals are filling positions in many types of organizations in roles that will, in fact, have an impact throughout the life cycle of data in the research enterprise.\r\n\r\nOf the fifty-five graduates to date, we have been able to track placement of forty-nine individuals. Thirty-three percent have taken positions in research libraries and museums. A good number of these graduates have gone to academic libraries, but some are working in national libraries, special libraries, large art museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. Twenty percent have gone to research centers, including national data centers and digital humanities and scientific research institutes, where they are more directly involved with the research applications and curation of data. Another twenty percent are in the corporate sector, which needs high-functioning data to gain competitive market advantage, but in these settings curation skills are also being blended with statistical competencies that have more traditionally been labeled as data science. The nearly fifty position titles also show how curation positions are being formalized; they range from data curator, data-management consultant, research data librarian, and digital preservation librarian to data analyst, digital asset manager, and information architect.\r\n\r\nThrough our experience with the DCEP program, the benefits of internships and practicum in data centers became evident, and field experiences are now a priority in our next phases of program development. The Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) initiative, funded by IMLS, has been a major step in building a model for integrating field experiences into MA and PhD programs through a partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a long-standing international leader in scientific data infrastructure and services. The DCERC collaboration includes the University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences, whose participating masters students complete the Foundations of Data Curation course at Illinois.\r\n\r\nThe NCAR internships, piloted with Illinois doctoral students and Tennessee masters students, have been explicitly designed to mentor students in both data management and the scientific research contexts. It is our belief that apprenticeships need to involve students directly in best practices at mature data centers and expose them to the actual data problems that active researchers experience; this will prepare them adequately to excel at curation in data-intensive research environments.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nThis paper provided an overview of our approach to data curation education. It is important to note that this approach has been greatly influenced, both formally and informally, by our many collaborators and colleagues working to improve data access and research capabilities for scholarship in both the sciences and humanities. Our “purposeful curation” perspective is not meant to be comparative to other curation programs or an exhaustive, fully articulated pedagogy. However, we do feel that our student placement data, especially the high number of graduates placed across different types of research organizations, is solid evidence for the success of this particular approach.\r\n\r\nThe historical overview presented at the beginning of the paper gave an account of the concepts and definitions related to data curation based on the literature encountered through our work on the DCEP and DCERC initiatives, as both seasoned and new LIS educators and researchers. So, while we have identified a number of landmarks and trends in the conception of data curation to date, much of the story is still to be traced, interpreted, and retold. We hope that this initial effort will encourage additions, corrections, and amendments to the history of the field, and in turn lead to better sharing of both seasoned and new pedagogical approaches to what may prove to be an important turning point for the information professions.\r\n<div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div></div>\r\n</div>','Foundations of Data Curation: The Pedagogy and Practice of “Purposeful Work” with Research Data','','inherit','open','open','','4819-revision-10','','','2013-06-28 19:41:35','2013-06-28 19:41:35','',4819,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4819-revision-10/',0,'revision','',0),(4953,1,'2013-06-28 19:42:47','2013-06-28 19:42:47','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nIn her article, “Disciplinarity and Disorder,” in Issue 1 of this journal, Gabrielle Dean opens her essay with a detailed and expressive “fantasy” describing the “primal scene of archival research [that] takes place in a dreary reading room,” featuring an archivist, a researcher, a cart, dusty gray boxes, and a “numbered file folder.” As her fantasy takes flight, with the researcher scribbling away and papers swirling and new collections sprouting up organically, she crafts an evocative metaphor for the life cycle of preservation and regeneration that archivists aim to enable through access to primary sources. Dean cogently deconstructs the origins and implications of this “primal scene” over the course of her essay. But what also merits highlighting in her opening metaphor are the accoutrements that populate it—the cart, the box, the file folder—familiar players on the stage of the archival encounter. These objects and symbols are evocative of that idealized moment of archaeological discovery that characterizes the use of the archive. They are objects and symbols of history, certainly, but relics, alas, of an analog age.\r\n\r\nA similar fantasy, one potentially more fraught with anxiety and dread, must darken the reveries of archivists as they attempt to provide access to more contemporary materials. A daydream involving the researcher of tomorrow may instead feature dreadful moments of “file cannot be opened” error messages, of FTP transfers gone awry, of decaying media orphaned from long-lost playback devices. Our imaginary researcher will not be awaiting archival discovery sitting in a dreary reading room, but instead exist in some networked who-knows-where, furiously emailing an endless stream of access and transfer request and constantly griping about obsolete formats and buggy interfaces. At the same time, our imaginary archivist will not be pushing carts or shelving boxes, but creating user accounts for virtual reading rooms, running pattern-recognition text-mining queries, uploading disk images, or helping users with emulation software. Like the content of our archives themselves, the props and symbols of our archival fantasies increasingly will be associated with born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nHow will traditional principles of archival arrangement and description be challenged or modified to account for born-digital materials? Arrangement and description have long been the primary method of facilitating the use of archives, and their methodologies have been dependent upon the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. The articulation of this theory in 1841 has been held as the “starting point” or beginning of the modern era of archival theory, a “watershed” event establishing the “basic principle” and “very core” of the archival endeavor. Superlatives abound. <i>Respect des fonds</i>, “more than any other principle, has come to provide the archival profession with a unique identity.” ((Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” in <i>Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies</i> (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), 108.))\r\n\r\nBut <i>respect des fonds</i> was born of a particular historic moment, for a particular type of archival document, and was conceived to address the practical needs of specific social circumstances. Even as <i>respect des fonds</i> has mutated and evolved over the decades, subject to revisions, contestations, and reaffirmations, its methodologies have largely been a product of the nature of the archival record as a physical document to be sorted, grouped, and described after receipt from a single donating entity. In an era defined by digital materials and their affordances and limitations, one in which narrative linearity often seems replaced by data-driven relationalism, the meaning of <i>respect des fonds</i> is ever more slippery.\r\n\r\nBroadly stated, <i>respect des fonds</i> is the principle of grouping records by the administration, organization, individual, or creating body in which they originated. <i>Respect des fonds</i> mandates that the records of the creating entity not be mixed with those of a different entity. It prioritizes the “organic” nature of archival records, identifying the locus of their generation, and the evidence their consolidation provides about that originating body, as essential to preserving and maintaining context. Comprised of the related “principle of original order” and “the principle of provenance,” <i>respect des fonds</i> displaced prior methods of archival arrangement that were predicated upon classifications by subject, function, topic, legal utility, chronology, and other categories. Though often referenced as a core component of archival identity, as a theoretical concept, <i>respect des fonds</i> is, as one writer says, “elusive and oft-misunderstood.” ((Dan Zelenyj, “Linchpin Imperilled: The Functional Interpretation of Series and the Principle of Respect des Fonds,” <i>Archivaria</i> 42 (1996): 126.))\r\n\r\nThe introduction of born-digital records into the archives offers an opportunity to examine how the practical methodologies of arrangement and description are shifting and how those changing practices lead to a reconsideration of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Much as digital records’ technological dependencies, ease of duplication, and subordination to features of systems and storage have led to a reassessment of the existing precepts of archival appraisal and selection, they also prompt a similar analysis of arrangement and description. One of those axioms due reassessment is the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i>.\r\n\r\nThis essay details the social and material conditions of the emergence of <i>respect des fonds</i>, the theory’s complex practical implementations and contested assumption, the emergence of alternate models, and how born-digital materials illuminate the theory’s analog origins and limitations. I will also explain the specific qualities of digital objects, including the nature of inscription and its impact on notions of original order and authenticity, as well as how nonlinear retrieval supplants the narrative logic of <i>respect des fonds</i> with a broader notion of context and discoverability. I will then consider recent interpretive methods, such as data visualization and text mining, as potential harbingers of new modes of representing and creating interfaces to digital collections—representations that better capitalize on the possibilities of digital materials. Finally, I will argue that the affordances of born-digital archives—such as their potential for parallel representation, machine-enabled interpretation, and expansive contextual and intellectual availability—provoke a reconsideration of the place of privilege of <i>respect des fonds </i>in archival arrangement and description.\r\n\r\n<b>The Old Regime</b>\r\n\r\nBefore <i>respect des</i> <i>fonds</i> can be respected, disrespected, or neglected, a better understanding of its origins is warranted, along with an examination of how the principle has (or has not) been applied and its periodic contestation. The seductive purity of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> often overshadows the concept’s decidedly complex origins. <i>Respect des fonds</i> as a guiding method of archival control was never as ennobled an idea as its contemporary evocation often implies. Its original articulation was mired in professional infighting, reductive practicalities, and the tumult and disorganization of political change.\r\n\r\nWhile we can find records grouped according to creator in some earlier instances, ((Luciana Duranti, “Origin and Development of Archival Description,” <i>Archivaria</i> 35 (1993): 50.)) the formal articulation of the concept of <i>respect des fonds</i> was, like much of modernity, a by-product of the French Revolution. The Revolution featured a simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of the archive, an attempt to both erase and recast the historical record. Most famously, when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille they destroyed its documentary contents—records that instantiated the subjugation and exploitation of the despised monarchy. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4724\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4724\" alt=\"Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background.  Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1-300x237.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"237\" /></a> Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background. Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet the revolutionaries’ also scrupulously preserved the record of their own activities. The <i>Archives Nationales</i> was established in 1790, with a head archivist, hours designated for the general public, and a centralized administration tasked both with preserving the legacy of the new government and managing select records of the Old Regime. Those tasks, however, were segregated in ways that impacted how each class of documents was handled. Records of the National Assembly were to be scrupulously maintained, while feudal titles were widely destroyed. As one Minster put it, “all the old documents with gothic script are … only legal titles of feudalism, of the subjection of the feeble to the strong.” ((As cited in Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 3, no. 3 (1940): 162.))\r\n\r\nThe management of archives during this time was chaotic. Property records were sent to one administrative body within the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, legal records to another, and documents of historical interest went to the <i>Bibliotheque Nationales</i>. At the same time, archivists were tasked with maintaining a distinction between records documenting pre- and post-Revolutionary activities. In addition, the first two administrative heads of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, Armand-Gaston Camus and Pierre Daunou, were both trained as librarians and had, by the early 1800s, established twenty-four “groupings” of records into which future accessions were to be integrated. Within these groups, additional classifications and intellectual methods of ordering existed. The archives, then, were “arranged in accordance with an arbitrarily devised ‘methodical’ scheme that was derived from library experience.” ((T. R Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archive : Principles and Techniques</i> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 169.)) As well, political tumult and instability of governance continued to have an impact on the arrangement of the archives, and “decisions about preservation, classification, inventory, and access were therefore the result not just of practical considerations or the opinions of individual archivists and librarians, but also of key shifts in national politics.” ((Lara Moore, <i>Restoring Order: The Ecole Des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870</i> (Duluth, Minnesota: Litwin Books, 2008), 17.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Origins of <i>Respect des Fonds</i></b>\r\n\r\nWhile the true extent of records destruction during the post-Revolutionary years is disputed, ((Carl Lokke, “Archives and the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 31, no. 1 (January 1968): 30-31.)) as Judith Panitch notes, “this chaotic episode of archival history reveals much about archives themselves, suggesting specifically their fundamental fragility and malleability.” ((Judith Panitch, “Liberty, equality, posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 59, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 33.)) That malleability is evident in the conflicting approaches to archival arrangement and description that characterized this era, practices that lead up to the declaration of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Records of the time were arranged primarily by sometimes-quixotic methods of classification, by schema idiosyncratic in origin and inconsistent in application. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 167.))\r\n\r\nA number of developments in the next few decades pushed this lack of uniformity to its breaking point and helped impel the conceptualization of <i>respect des fonds</i> as an archival principle, if, as I will show, less of an actual practice. The establishment of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> in 1821 created a formal institution to train archivists to staff both the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and the over 2500 provincial archives across France. Laws passed in the 1830s also drastically expanded the number of archivists mandated to work both in the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and in the provincial archives. Formal training and new positions, however, when combined with lax oversight and inconsistent guidance on practices, led, predictably, to a near-comic proliferation of methods of classification and arrangement. (See Figure 2.) Due to the proliferation of classification systems and schema, change was inevitable.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4725\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"480\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image2.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-4725\" alt=\"Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s &quot;Restoring Order,&quot; 114.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image2.jpg\" width=\"480\" height=\"383\" /></a> Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s \"Restoring Order,\" 114.[/caption]\r\n\r\nThat change came in the form of the infamous “Circular no. 14,” released in 1841 by Natalis de Wailly, Administrative Head of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>. This document is recognized as the first articulation of the fonds as the fundamental method of archival arrangement, the purpose of which was “to form a collection of all the documents which originate from a body, an organization, a family or an individual, and to arrange the different fonds according to a certain order.” ((As quoted in Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 107.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> made creatorship the organizing principle of archival records and espoused the formation of collections according to the organization, entity, family, or individual responsible for their creation. Such an arrangement would ensure, as one writer later put it, the essential need “to know where it [the archival document] was created, in the framework of what process, to what end, for whom, when and how it was received by the addressee, and how it came into our hands.” ((Michael Duchein, “Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems of Respect des fonds in Archival Science,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 67.))\r\n\r\nHowever, as Nancy Bartlett has explicated, this “watershed” moment was less momentous than contemporary evocations suggest. For one, de Wailly’s circular dictated “that <i>respect des fonds</i> was prescribed only for archival records created prior to 1789.” More contemporary fonds were to continue to be arranged categorically. In addition, minutes from subsequent meetings of the commission overseeing the work of archivists—a commission on which de Wailly served—reveal that “<i>respect des fonds</i> was if nothing more a preliminary standard for archival arrangement and description in departmental archives, a means of insuring that beginning archivists without the benefit of direct supervision might not cause too much intellectual damage to vulnerable records in their care.” ((Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 111.))\r\n\r\nThe principle was, in fact, a practical exigency, a method to simplify archival arrangement seen as more easily implemented by novice archivists than the more rigorous arrangement by classification. Bartlett also notes that <i>respect des fonds</i> remained absent from both the curriculum of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> as well as the publications of the professional society of its graduates. Lastly, the principle was, at the time, not applied to accessions into the <i>Archive Nationales</i> itself, as it operated under a different administrative department than de Wailly’s Interior Ministry.\r\n\r\n<i>Respect des fonds</i>, then, was never a perfectly realized theory. Its formation was a contingency of a unique historical moment; its conception depended upon practical necessities and its implementation was inconsistent and disputed. What today seems near dogma—that archives be arranged by fonds—was at the time novel and simplistic, more the product of utility and political manipulation than a grand inspiration regarding the functional authenticity of fonds or evidential purity towards their arrangement.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4726\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"183\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4726 \" alt=\"Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3-183x300.jpg\" width=\"183\" height=\"300\" /></a> Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>The Original Original Order</b>\r\n\r\nThough implemented inconsistently in its home country, the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained a wide acceptance across Europe. In Prussia, the theory (known as <i>Provenienzprinzip,</i> the principle of provenance) mandated that “official papers are to be maintained in the order and with the designations which they received in the course of the official activity of the agency concerned.” ((Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archives</i>, 175.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> received its most elaborate and sustained justification, and expansion, however, in the Netherlands, where the Dutch archivists Muller, Feith, and Fruin produced their famous <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> in 1898. Often referred to colloquially as the “Dutch Manual” and seen as the “starting point of archival theory and methodology,” ((Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” <i>The American Archivist </i>66, no. 2 (2003): 249.)) the work provided a detailed set of guidelines for the arrangement of records. The principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained even wider acceptance and popularity after its ratification at the First International Congress of Archivists meeting in Brussels in 1910. ((Lawrence D. Geller, “Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists, Brussels, 1910,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 16. Proceedings from the 1910 meeting can be found online at <a href=\"http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/\">http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/</a>.)) (See Figure 3.)\r\n\r\nThe Dutch Manual, and the methodologies implemented in its wake, not only forbid the intermingling of the fonds of one agency with those of another—in keeping with the French conception of <i>respect des fonds</i>—but also expanded the theory to apply to the records within each fond—the internal arrangement of the archival collection. Or as the Dutch Manual put it, “the system of arrangement must be based on the original organization of the archival collection.” ((Samuel Muller, Johan Adriaan Feith, and Robert Fruin, <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> (H.W. Wilson Co., 1968), 52.)) This concept has come to be known as the “principle of original order,” an intra-fonds corollary to the external means of arrangement associated with the principle of provenance; <i>respect des fonds</i> encompasses both principles.\r\n\r\nA closer examination of the Dutch Manual, however, reveals certain methodological impracticalities that even its authors admit. First, they claim that the original order within a fonds may be modified or “restored” to account for multiple transfers from an agency, not all of which may truly represent the idealized “original order.” As well, records may be reorganized to account for “inconsequential irregularities attributable to record-keeping officials.” The authors also note that reconstituting the original order may be avoided when “the trouble which would have to be taken in order to reconstruct the old organization is out of proportion to the result to be obtained.” ((Muller et al., <i>Manual</i>, 83.)) Needless to say, the simple idea of “restoring original order” seems itself problematic, fraught with subjective decision-making likely far removed from whatever idealized “organic” origin archivists may discover within fonds. The complicated approach to “restoration” and “reconstruction” that the Dutch Manual advises often borders on, as one writer put it, “abandoning entirely their carefully developed ethic of conservation.” ((Frank Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” <i>The American Archivist </i>45, no. 1 (1982): 28.))\r\n\r\n<b>Critique des Fonds</b>\r\n\r\nThe widespread adoption <i>of respect des fonds</i> did not proceed unquestioned, however. As early as the 1930s, some archivists were taking issue with the methodology of arranging collections according to original order. In his survey of the development of archival theory, Ernst Posner points to the German Max Bar and two Swedish archivists who demonstrated “that slavish preservation of the original arrangement of a fonds is often insufficient,” the principle of provenance “is subject to certain restrictions” that make blanket adoption impractical, and adherence to <i>respect des fonds</i> often impedes use of archival materials. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 169.))\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4747\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4747 \" alt=\"Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, &quot;The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,&quot; 1966. \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4-300x177.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"177\" /></a> Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, \"The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,\" 1966.[/caption]\r\n\r\nSome Australian and American archivists in the 1960s, primarily Peter Scott and Mario Fenyo, challenged the definition of fonds even further. The problems with the traditional concept of the fonds were manifold. Defining fonds as the records of a “transferring or controlling agency” was problematic since the agent of transfer was not always the creating agency. Fonds could also be mixed or “broken” into multiple transfers to an archive, making reconstitution difficult. Fonds could also be the result of “a succession of agencies,” blurring true creatorship. Ordering series within fonds was difficult since future accessions may need to be inserted at different places in the existing organizational system, leading to physical disorder or the constant revision of finding aids or inventories. After reviewing minutes of early NARA meetings in an attempt to define what, exactly, constitutes a fonds, Fenyo succinctly pointed out, “no one knows what the word fonds means, not even the French who invented it.” ((Mario D. Fenyo, “The Record Group Concept: A Critique,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 2 (April 1966): 230.)) For Scott, his belief that “the very arbitrariness of the concept [of the fonds] is sufficient to make one question its usefulness,” ((Peter Scott, “The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 4 (October 1966): 497.)) led him to develop the “series system” (See Figure 4) which sought to orient arrangement and description according to function and use instead of agent or material type—a theory that, Terry Cook noted, “shifted the entire archival description enterprise from a static cataloging mode to a dynamic system of multiple interrelationships.” ((Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” <i>Archivaria</i> 43 (1999): 38.))\r\n\r\nThe principle of original order underwent a similar critique. A lack of clarity on the custodianship of records prior to their delivery to an archive, the problem of multiple and ongoing accessions, and the potential for incoherent or unknown methods of ordering or classification by creating bodies all led Fenyo to proclaim, “archivists generally believe that the arrangement of series within a record group reflects to some extent the organization and even history of the agency that created those records.… But the records in the National Archives reflect no such thing.” ((Fenyo, \"The Record Group Concept,\" 236.)) For archives consisting of personal papers, original order is seen as particularly problematic, since a chronological arrangement seemingly provides the greatest meaning and value to the records of an individual, but is unlikely to be the order of records upon accession. Restoration of original order also risks destroying the contextual information accrued by collections that have passed through multiple states of custodianship prior to their acceptance into the archive. ((Debra Barr, “Protecting Provenance: Response to the Report of the Working Group on Description at the Fonds Level,” <i>Archivaria</i> 28 (Summer 1989): 141-145. See also Robert Edwards, “‘With Respect to Original Order’: Changing Values in Archival Arrangement,” <i>Archives Association of British Columbia</i> 11, no. 1 (Winter 2001).)) Lastly, the principle of original order prioritizes filing systems of unknown or dubious legitimacy over the principle of use or accessibility. As Frank Boles states, “usability acknowledges the evidential superiority of documents over filing systems by placing primary emphasis on access to documents.” ((Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” 31.)) In this critique, usability and original order are often in conflict.\r\n\r\n<b>Of Bonds and Parallels</b>\r\n\r\nOther conceptual models besides the series system have attempted to address these critiques by forming new ideas about how order or grouping can evidence archival authenticity, identity, and meaning. One theory to articulate the interrelations of individual records can be found in Luciana Duranti’s notion of the archival bond, which she defines as the “network of relations that each record has with the records belonging in the same aggregation.” ((Luciana Duranti, “The Archival Bond,” <i>Archives and Museum Informatics</i> 11 (1997): 213-18.)) Not to be confused with context, which exists outside the record, the archival bond, for Duranti, is core to the identity of the record. As she states, “documents that are expressions of a transaction are not records until they are put into relation with other records.” ((Ibid., 216.)) Emerging from research into the authenticity of electronic records (including the InterPARES project), the archival bond identifies a web of documentary co-dependencies that presumes an inheritance and relationship between records based on functional proximity. ((“The InterPARES Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://www.interpares.org\">www.interpares.org</a>.))\r\n\r\nPerhaps the most exhaustive attempt to deal with many difficulties that exist within the gulf between <i>respect des fonds</i> as principle and practice was undertaken by Michel Duchein in 1983. ((Duchein, \"Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems,\" 64–82.)) While Duchein proposes solutions to the many problems of the fonds concept, the reader cannot help but be overwhelmed by the fact that his cataloging of the “theoretical problems” and “practical difficulties” far outnumber, and begin to drown out, his proposed solutions. For Duchein, within fonds there can be all sorts of nebulous, arbitrary, and forgotten methods of classification “from which all imaginable disorders flow.” He calls these, in a poetic moment, “brutal manipulations.” ((Ibid., 77.)) But after this disquisition, on the last page of his article Duchein mentions one idea that seems if not prescient, then at least transitive in the way it conceives of context: the <i>parallelismus membrorum</i>, “the similarity of parallel files.” <i>Parallelismus membrorum</i> is a rhetorical term referring to the patterns within a text formed by the utilization of repeated grammatical structures. (“I came. I saw. I conquered,” is a brief example). Duchein here employs the motif to refer to the contextual relations that exist between records of different fonds, the network of meanings that stretch across the archive.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4927  \" alt=\"Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, &quot;The Little Truck.&quot; The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, &quot;Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5-300x199.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a> Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, \"The Little Truck.\" The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, \"Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”[/caption]\r\n\r\nChris Hurley explored an idea similar to <i>parallelismus membrorum</i> in his delineation of “parallel provenance” a concept built around “composing different things from the same particles—combining things in different ways to produce a variety of views of what they look like in the aggregate … not so much about identifying a different creator as recognizing manifold context.” ((Chris Hurley, “Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?,” <i>Archives and Manuscripts</i> 33, no. 1 (2005): 126.)) (See Figure 5.) Other contemporary writers, such as Laura Millar and Geoffrey Yeo, have sought to stretch the meaning of the fonds even further, arguing it exists purely at the conceptual level. ((Geoffrey Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds and the Physical Collection,” <i>Archivaria</i> 73 (Spring 2012): 43-91; Laura Millar, “The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance: Archival Context in Space and Time,” <i>Archivaria</i> 53 (Spring 2002): 1-15.)) But as the definition of the fonds becomes more distant, more abstract, its privileging as a form of aggregation seems less certain, especially in a digital environment in which creatorship is but one of many means of grouping records.\r\n\r\nThe archival bond, the series system, <i>parallelismus membrorum, </i>and parallel provenance all mark attempts to theorize relationships between records and collections in ways that can elide the practical problems of <i>res</i><i>pect des fonds</i>. Equally, these ideas represent a continued expansion of context beyond the limitations of grouping by creatorship or creator-derived order. In each case, similarities and dependencies emerge out of cross-collection networks or semantically derived principles. As the models gain distance from the vagaries of the individual records, one starts to recognize a familiar pattern of removal—not a disjunction, exactly, but a subtle passage from the material trace to the abstract representation. The familiarity is borne of the similar movement from item to representation that characterizes electronic records and their attendant phenomenological tension between the physical inscription on a drive and the symbolic interface on a screen.\r\n\r\n<b>Bit Level Processing</b>\r\n\r\nBut enough of models. Consider instead the bit, the binary, the magnetic flux reversal of the spinning disk that is the origin of the digital object. Material inscription offers a good point to segue into an examination of digital records and how they both complicate or even circumvent historical notions of <i>respect des fonds </i> while at the same time enabling realization of a more expansive notion of context and interrelation.\r\n\r\nStarting at the bit level, the characteristics of inscription (how digital information is written onto storage media) call into question the idea of original order. When data is written to a storage device, it has a material, physical trace, but that trace is far from the legibility or interpretability we associate with analog documents. As Matt Kirschenbaum has noted in his study of new media and digital forensics, “we write <i>on</i> paper, but we write <i>to</i> a magnetic disk (or tape)”; the semantic difference signifies that the act of inscription is “logically distinct” from the act of creation and intellectual manipulation. ((Matt Kirschenbaum, <i>Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination</i> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 87. Emphasis in original.)) (See Figure 6.) In addition, a key component of storage media is that it is random access; that means the bits composing a record are inscribed to available clusters across the platter of a drive depending on which tracks and sectors are available for inscription. That is, the component bits of a digital object are non-sequential in their material physical arrangement. Aggregated, they can create an interpretable object, but their component location is nonlinear. Here, even at the bit level of a single item, there is no original order. Furthermore, each time these bits are reconstructed, each time the file is accessed and translated into an interpretable, editable representation, the file will be altered in minute ways (for instance, a file’s “last opened” date) and thus be composed of a new order as new bits are assigned to other available areas of the disk. As Kirschenbaum notes, quoting a dictum of forensic science, “every contact leaves a trace.” The act of interpreting a digital object, thus, continually alters its material order.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4729\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4729 \" title=\"bailey_archivejournal_image6\" alt=\"Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head.<br />Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.[/caption]\r\n\r\nMoving beyond the non-sequential arrangement of bits of individual records, but remaining at the forensic level, other features of the digital environment challenge long-standing presumptions of authenticity and uniqueness that are dependent upon physical arrangement or description. Temporary files, such as those stored by auto-save or recovery programs, mean that a drive can contain multiple versions of identical files, many of them beyond the management (or even awareness) of their creator. This “ambient data” is matched by other features of data dispersal throughout a storage system, such as “swap space” (disk space sometimes allocated for use by RAM) and “disk slack” (which accounts for the difference between the actual file size and the disk space used for storage) that themselves complicate ideas of order and linearity. Storage becomes a hidden, dynamic world in which physical arrangement on a spinning drive consists of the equivalent of dispersed crevices, hidey-holes, and secret areas where data proliferates. Kirschenbaum asserts, “there is, in short, no simple way to know how many instances of a single file are residing in how many states, in how many different locations, at any given moment in the operating system.” ((Ibid., 52.)) As well, digital objects themselves have the potential to contain trace data that, while possibly not achieving the singular identity of a record, can have evidential value or help establish provenance.\r\n\r\nTake, for instance, Kirschenbaum’s exploration of a floppy disk image, in which he finds evidence of how the storage media was used over time and what its hidden and partially deleted data can manifest about its user: “[W]e discover on the original diskette the incompletely overwritten remains of previous software … a piece of 1980s software culture frozen in allographic amber.” ((Ibid., 140.)) Discovering this legacy information reveals multiple levels of creatorship and a trail of ownership and social and cultural meaning that extend beyond the object, the creator, or the fonds. In this case, the unintentionally preserved (by the user, at least) data provides a testament to its origins that is not visible in the individual files themselves. Here provenance is not a result of aggregation or description but a characteristic of how digital information is created and transmitted. Context is not just relational, implied, or conceptualized, but can be a part of the very media itself, like secret, half-formed barnacles clinging to the vessel of the digital record. Incomplete but decipherable. Fragmentary but meaningful. Allographic amber.\r\n\r\n<b>Fonds Essentialism</b>\r\n\r\nNeedless to say, most people do not interact with digital information at the forensic level. In Kenneth Thibodeau’s useful model, digital objects are compounds, composed of a physical, logical, and conceptual object. Respectively, those adjectives refer to the physical inscription on storage media; the logical suite of translational software and processes that access and “read” that inscription; and the conceptual object the user interacts with, such as the text, image, or interface on a screen. ((Kenneth Thibodeau, “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years,” in <i>The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective</i> (Washington D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2002).)) The conceptual object—the representational environment of the screen as experienced in the word processing program, the image editor, the social media app—inculcates its own affordances and logic on the creation or use of records. In fact, given the hidden, inscrutable nature of storage and inscription, the formal representation of digital objects on a screen can have an outsized influence on their creation, management, and perception—an interpretive tendency that Nick Montford calls “screen essentialism.” Considering the extensive influence that the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i> has had, historically, on how archival collections are arranged and described, a similar predilection may characterize the archival enterprise—call it <i>fonds essentialism</i>.\r\n\r\nThe conceptual object—the screen—presents its own challenges to the implied narrative of current modes of archival description. The way that a user interacts with an aggregation of digital materials is fundamentally different from how a user would interact with a set of document boxes or a finding aid. The screen imposes its own logic, its own “formal regimen,” in Kirschenbaum’s terms, on how digital objects are interpreted or accessed, but also how they are described. Traditional archival representation for analog materials emerges from a narrative: a story about what a collection is, what it holds, and the order and location of its contents. It moves through a descriptive summary of contextual detail and administrative information and on to a hierarchy of series and subseries often arranged by type, function, chronology, or other broad categories. Papers, folders, boxes, and series must be arranged in physical space, after all, and that comes to shape how they are arranged in the intellectual space of description. A finding aid is a narrative to be read and its intellectual availability is largely linear and structural. The conceptual object of the digital record and the interface to an aggregation of digital records offer quite a different type of interaction.\r\n\r\nText mining and hyperlinks are simple examples of ways to navigate large groups of materials absent a singular narrative sequence. Lev Manovich, in theorizing new media, has noted that the database (or, the database logic) has supplanted narrative as the method of interacting with digital information. In new media, “narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among others,” and digital information assumes “the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself.” ((Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” <i>Journal of A&amp;I Society</i> 14, no. 2 (May 2000): 176-77.)) In a database, objects are related but not ordered. The database logic is nonlinear and there is no original order because order is dependent upon query. Search and navigation become algorithm-dependent and not predetermined by a creator, an archivist, or a static finding aid—though all of those organizations are themselves available. Digital objects will have an identifier, yes, but where they “rest” in intellectual space is contingent, mutable. The key point is that, even at the level of representation, arrangement is dynamic: access and representation need not depend on the fonds. Description becomes relational as well and can extend beyond individual aggregations of records. The logic of physical space no longer drives retrieval or predominates in description. Original order and provenance are not lost or obviated in this model, but they are not the exclusive means of access, either.\r\n\r\n<b>Recent Practices</b>\r\n\r\nCase studies from projects handling significant amounts of born-digital records provide insight into the theoretical and practical problems of <i>respect des fonds</i>. As the Emory University project asked of the born-digital content in its Salmon Rushdie acquisition, “Would we treat the born-digital files the same as print material? Would we impose any sort of arrangement on the materials? How much added description could we provide? As the following discussion will reveal, the application of archival theory and principles may shift to accommodate the differences between paper and born-digital archives.” ((Laura Carroll et al., “A Comprehensive Approach to Born-Digital Archives,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 72.)) Or, as the large-scale, born-digital Vancouver Olympics project team put it, “core archival activities may diverge from long-established practices when moving into the digital environment.” ((Courtney C. Mumma, Glenn Dingwall, and Sue Bigelow, “A First Look at the Acquisition and Appraisal of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Fonds: Or, SELECT * FROM VANOC_Records AS Archives WHERE Value=‘true’;,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 93.)) Along with the multi-institutional AIMS project and the PARADIGM (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) project in the UK, these case studies detail the practical issues involved in rethinking arrangement and description in born-digital archives. ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/</a>; Paradigm project, “Workbook on Digital Private Papers,” The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (Paradigm) Project, accessed October 2012,  <a href=\"http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html\">http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nTaken together, the projects provide an overview of how arrangement may look in entirely born-digital collections. All note the difficulty in parsing user-generated description and the often quixotic or meaningless nature of directory structures and naming. The projects largely employed filtering, text mining, and other cross-record queries to determine the content of most files. The sheer volume of files contained in accessions precluded any item-level content review or hierarchical rearrangement; yet, at the same time, “the creation of file and item descriptions and inventories is not only easier and faster, it yields much richer information.… What takes hours or days to perform in the paper environment takes mere seconds to accomplish in the digital environment, and is done to a greater level of detail.” ((Mumma et al., \"A First Look,\" 115-16.))\r\n\r\nThough the many technical processes necessary for format validation, emulation, automated metadata extraction, and other methods of processing born-digital archives are too complex to be fully recounted here, these case studies point to their key characteristics. (See Video 1.) Arrangement, as we think of it, is no longer a process of imposing intellectualized hierarchies or physical relocation; instead, it becomes largely automated, algorithmic, and batch processed. At the same time, archival representation will build upon the affordances of the digital objects themselves to extract and compile metadata that can then be repurposed to bridge and augment a wealth of contextual relations far beyond the order of their creation and their agency of origin.\r\n\r\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAhbR8dyp8\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Video 1. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 2011.</div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Visual Descriptions</b>\r\n\r\nAs the “logical associations of records extend beyond the records themselves and embrace relations with other entities in the wider world,” as Geoffrey Yeo puts it, archivists will be tasked with building interfaces that draw upon these aforementioned possibilities and linking them to the online interfaces through which records will be made available. ((Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds,” 71.)) The interface thus becomes the “critical element in the interaction between documentary evidence and its consumers.” ((Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past,” <i>Archival Science</i> 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 24.))\r\n\r\nSince few archives are accessioning entirely born-digital collections, it is difficult to find archival examples of a description for such a collection. Born-digital content that is currently being processed is usually a small portion of a larger physical collection and, as such, is integrated in a hybrid fashion into traditional finding aids; see, for instance, \"<a href=\"http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9p3038mq/\">Series 8: Born digital files</a>,\" \"<a href=\"http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/rushdie1000/\">Series 11: Computers and related devices</a>,\" or \"<a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">Series 13: Computer files</a>.\"\r\n\r\nThere are, however, some archival projects, as well as work in the digital humanities, that offer a window into how researchers and scholars are making using of large sets of digital data. While the data sets and digital records being utilized are not necessarily archival collections, the tools, methods of inquiry, and cross-collection, multi-institutional repositories that emerge from these projects presage both how entirely born-digital archives may come to be used and what digital archival collection interfaces may look like in the future.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4928\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4928  \" alt=\"Figure 7. Image from &quot;Data Mining with Criminal Intent&quot; presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7-300x179.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"179\" /></a> Figure 7. Image from \"Data Mining with Criminal Intent\" presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\nTwo projects taking an innovative, insightful approach to exploring archival collections through the mining of large archival corpora are The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online and Cameron Blevins’s work text mining and topic modeling Martha Ballard’s diary. ((The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online can be found at <a href=\"http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/\">http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/</a>, and the associated Criminal Intent project can be found at <a href=\"http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/\">http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/</a>. Cameron Blevin’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary can be found online at <a href=\"http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/\">http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/</a> and at <a href=\"http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml\">http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml</a>.)) The Old Bailey Proceedings provides access to nearly 200,000 digitized trial records from London’s criminal courts, spans almost 250 years, allows full text searching, and has an API through which users can query the archive. The With Criminal Intent project has built a suite of related tools that can help perform data-mining projects using this archive. (See Figure 7.) This project measures and visualizes trends over time as a means of revealing historical themes, building and revealing new narratives, and providing insights into the past through data-driven analysis.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4731\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4731 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Screenshot from &quot;Mining the Dispatch&quot; website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8-300x210.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\" /></a> Figure 8. Screenshot from \"Mining the Dispatch\" website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.[/caption]\r\n\r\nBlevins’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary features a different collection, a single diary by an eighteenth-century housewife composed of almost 10,000 entries from 1785 to 1812. This project aspires to a similar goal of revealing novel insights into, and interpretations of, historical material through the ability of digital tools to mine vast sets of information. Blevins uses topic modeling—an algorithmic method that searches word patterns and groupings throughout large collections of texts (for Ballard’s diary, each entry was treated as a different “text”)—to chart and track thematic trends across the diary. A similar approach has been taken by the Mining the Dispatch project, which examines changing sentiments toward the Civil War over the course of six years (over 112,000 items) in the Richmond, Virginia <i>Daily Dispatch</i> newspaper. ((“Mining the Dispatch,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/\">http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/</a>.)) (See Figure 8.)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThese projects may fall under the broader rubric of the digital humanities, and the collections they are working with may not be archival collections in the traditional sense, but they offer a glimpse of the discovery, navigation, exploration, and analytic tools that foreshadow uses of digital archival collections. Other initiatives have sought to build upon the network of social relations that influence records creation. The SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) Project “provides access to the socio-historical contexts ([including] people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created” through the use of the EAC-CPF standard that describes corporate bodies, persons, and families. ((“SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/\">http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/</a>.)) Early results show a promising method for using social context for discovery and interpretation.  (See Figure 9.) The archivists at Stanford University who are managing the Robert Creeley collection, which contains a significant quantity of born-digital content, especially emails, have used the custom-built MUSE tool for exploring semantic patterns in email archives. ((The Robert Creeley collection can be found at <a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html</a>. For more information on the MUSE tool visit <a href=\"http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/\">http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/</a>.)) (See Figure 10.) Similarly, other projects have explored building unique visual interfaces to archival collections that extend contextual relations across collections, archives, and disciplines. (See Video 2.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4732\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4732 \" alt=\"Figure 9. Image from &quot;Historic Social Networks&quot; presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 9. Image from \"Historic Social Networks\" presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4727\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4727 \" alt=\"Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10-300x265.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"265\" /></a> Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\nhttp://vimeo.com/6694353\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\" style=\"text-align: left;\">Video 2. Visible Archive Series Browser, Mitchell Whitelaw. 2012.</div>\r\nWhat distinguishes these projects from archival representations of old is that context and meaning are not exclusively provided through descriptive, narrative details that precede an arrangement and location list, but instead through networks, inter-linkages, modeling, and content analysis. Users can move dynamically within a collection and laterally across collections. Search, query, and tools like topic modeling also allow the user to build their own patterns and hierarchies for discovery. In this view, archival description still plays a crucial role in providing information on what something is or how it came to be created, but no longer is the fonds or idea of original order the sole determinant of representation.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nAs Luciana Duranti has noted, archival description “has been carried out or not carried out depending on specific needs and conditions, attitudes and requirements, and its products have consistently reflected the conceptions about archives held by the society of the time.” ((Duranti, “Origin and Development,” 53.)) In the physical world of items, folders, boxes, and shelves, the archive must be sorted, ordered, and stored sequentially in space. Those properties, along with social, cultural, and political attitudes have driven how archival arrangement and description are theorized and practiced. Indeed, description itself has always had to serve multiple purposes: to provide historical or biographical information, scope and content detail, physical location for retrieval, administrative information for ongoing management, and restrictions and material types governing use. In a sense, description itself is a compound object, tugged between the needs of physical arrangement, intellectual representation, and user expectation. The properties of digital records allow archivists to revisit that negotiation. At the same time, other qualities of digital information, like the forensic disk image, have the potential to preserve both a mechanical version of “order” as well as provenancial and contextual information that formerly were provided through description. File fixity, forensic imaging, directory manifests, and auto-generated metadata may all come to play a larger role in defining provenance.\r\n\r\nWe disrespect des fonds, then, not as an act of elimination or insubordination, but in order to bring other contextual relations to its same level of privilege. Consider it less a disrespect, perhaps, than a humbling; or, instead, consider it a reaffirmation that the multiplicity of meanings possible with digital records can be better realized through an ongoing interrogation of archival traditions of arrangement and description. In rethinking <i>respect des fonds</i>, we gain a better awareness of the extent to which the material affordances of paper records have had an undue influence on how we conceptualize and practice grouping and describing collections. Bits, however, are fundamentally different at the material and symbolic levels. The use of digital objects is different as well, influenced by computational processing, algorithmic query, automation, and dynamism, not to mention social conditions, user expectations, technology dependencies, storage requirements, and a host of other characteristics of how we create and use technology.\r\n\r\nParallels and bonds, series and topics, models and paradigms; at times these concepts have collided and resulted in a seeming antagonism between ideas like original order and random access, historical contingency and abstract principle, finding aid and dynamic query. But there have been similarities too: how the tension between record and representation mirrors that of inscription and screen; and how the component nature of digital objects resembles the component purpose of traditional archival description. To entrench methods of arrangement and description borne of the qualities of physical collections is to disregard the potential expansion of context that digital information can support. In recognizing how historically and socially contingent traditional practices (and the theories spawning those practices) were, we better recognize their potential dysfunction in a time of born-digital records. This is not to say that we should discard the idea of the fonds or the utility of original order, but perhaps it is time to revoke their privileged place in archival discourse and revisit the true goals of arrangement and description in light of the capabilities of digital records. Maybe then we can begin to understand what is possible when we think of collections as mutually contextual and interrelated instead of cloistered and static. And perhaps then other bonds, other parallels, other contexts, meanings, and interpretations can receive the same amount of respect that we have, for too long now, granted the fonds.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWikipedia articles created as part of this work:\r\n\r\nRespect des fonds: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds</a>\r\n\r\nOriginal Order: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order</a>\r\n\r\nArchival Bond: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond</a>','Disrespect des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives','','inherit','open','open','','4722-revision-38','','','2013-06-28 19:42:47','2013-06-28 19:42:47','',4722,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4722-revision-38/',0,'revision','',0),(4954,1,'2013-06-28 19:42:17','2013-06-28 19:42:17','If you have been in an American public school between 1980 and today, it is highly probable that\r\nyou have played or watched someone playing <a title=\"Oregon Trail Series\" href=\"http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/oregon-trail-series\">The Oregon Trail</a>. ((“Oregon Trail Series,” accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Oregon Trail Series\" href=\"http://www.mobygames.com/gamegroup/oregon-trail-series\">http://www.mobygames.com/gamegroup/oregon-trail-series</a>. Some history of the game is given here: Devin Monnens, “Oregon Trail Ver. 3 (BASIC 3.1, 1978),” Desert Hat, November 7, 2010, <em id=\"__mceDel\"><em id=\"__mceDel\"><a href=\"http://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/\">http://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/</a>.</em></em>)) Originally released by the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium (MECC) for teletypes in the state\'s public schools, the <a title=\"Oregon Trail Canonization\" href=\"http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization\">game has progressed</a> from being played on a mainframe computer, to magazine type-in game, to mobile devices and <a title=\"Facebook: Oregon Settler\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler\">Facebook</a>. ((“On the Oregon Trail to Canonization,” A Video Game Canon, March 31, 2011, <a title=\"Oregon Trail Canonization\" href=\"http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization\">http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization</a>. “Oregon Trail: American Settler,” App Center, Facebook, accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Facebook: Oregon Settler\" href=\"http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler\">http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler</a>.)) More accurately called a simulation, The Oregon Trail puts the player in the shoes of an American migrant traveling to Oregon City through obstacles of weather, violence, starvation, and disease. The franchise is almost certainly the most successful educational game series, which, combined with its powerful iconic value, almost certainly guaranteed its inclusion in the case set for the second phase of <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\">Preserving Virtual</a> <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\"> Worlds</a> (PVW2). ((Preserving Virtual Worlds 2, accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\">http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/</a>.))\r\n\r\nWhen PVW2 began, we attempted to identify the significant properties of games in our case set with the hope of creating a generalizable methodology for game preservationists in the future. Examining which features changed or remained the same throughout a franchise\'s history was one way we went about identifying those properties, and The Oregon Trail, with <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\">its four-decade</a> <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\"> history</a>, was the perfect candidate. ((Jon-Paul Dyson, “Four Decades on the Oregon Trail,” CHEGheads, February 8, 2010, <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\">http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/</a>.)) The comic below illustrates some of our adventures, with otters representing the researchers. Why otters? All I will say is there might be an Easter egg in the PVW1 final report.','Of Snakebites, Squirrels, and Snow: Significant Properties of the Oregon Trail','','inherit','open','open','','4796-revision-14','','','2013-06-28 19:42:17','2013-06-28 19:42:17','',4796,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4796-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(4955,1,'2013-06-28 19:43:29','2013-06-28 19:43:29','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"746\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-4704 \" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-932x1024.jpg\" width=\"746\" height=\"819\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))</blockquote>\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n<blockquote>Another big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)</blockquote>\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n<blockquote>I know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)</blockquote>\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n<blockquote>It’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)</blockquote>\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n<blockquote>I wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)</blockquote>\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image, ((For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.)) but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts. ((A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420\">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420</a>.)) As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars. ((Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.)) When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)</blockquote>\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’” ((Ibid., 22.)) Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.” ((Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.)) This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable, ((Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.)) researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable. ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.” ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project. ((Ibid., 264.)) Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.))\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent, ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event. ((Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.)) This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal. ((The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at <a href=\"http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members\">http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members</a>.)) As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective, ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value. ((See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.)) Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials, ((See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.)) but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n<blockquote>Clearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)</blockquote>\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists. ((ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.))\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n<blockquote>Most of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)</blockquote>\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.” ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.))\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago, ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.)) before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error. ((Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.” ((Ibid., 17.))\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use. ((Ibid., 17-18.)) One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities. ((A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at <a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html\">http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n<blockquote>People don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)</blockquote>\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n<blockquote>We did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)</blockquote>\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. ((The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).)) Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-23','','','2013-06-28 19:43:29','2013-06-28 19:43:29','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-23/',0,'revision','',0),(4958,1,'2013-07-01 02:38:37','2013-07-01 02:38:37','My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. While it was not my initial intention, I was extremely pleased by the students’ abilities to research and study their own school’s history. They made extensive use of Lehigh’s Archives and Special Collections to collect numerous articles, documents, and perhaps most importantly, photographs, and they incorporated these materials into the different sections of the film (see Figures 1-6, below). Students discovered several cultural texts from the 1960s and 1970s that portrayed Lehigh as a haven for privileged masculinity, a sphere in which men appeared largely ignorant of the volatile civil rights movement and the emergent mid-century women’s movement. And yet, my students’ research also revealed that the Lehigh community of this era was also clearly cognizant of impending social changes. As my students tracked this tension between the ossification of male hegemony and the certainty of coming shifts, they developed a newfound appreciation for the importance of institutional history to the present operations of a university.\r\n\r\n<span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1388\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1388\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image1\" alt=\"The Trade with Cedar Crest.\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1-333x159.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"159\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 1: </em>The Trade with Cedar Crest. From Lehigh’s student newspaper, <em>The Brown &amp; White</em> (September 17, 1971). Image courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.</span></span>The prominence of Greek life is certainly one such feature of this legacy. Two of the four segments of the film address the role of fraternities and Greek social life, including the final section, which focuses on men and masculinity in Lehigh’s contemporary culture. The students who explored Lehigh’s mid-century Greek culture found ample textual evidence of its importance, including photographs, yearbook coverage, and film footage. When students interviewed alumni from the 1960s and 1970s, the men reported that Greek life had waned significantly in the years following coeducation. But when other students spoke with current male and female students, these individuals emphasized the enduring importance of fraternities and sororities to the culture of Lehigh. In addition, the group of filmmakers who focused on the period prior to coeducation highlighted the ways in which women were brought to campus for Saturday evening social events such as dances. My students interviewed several alumni who commented on the awkwardness of such activities, for both the men and the women. They even include a telling newspaper story in which Cedar Crest College, a small women’s college in nearby Allentown, is referenced as the bordello of Lehigh Valley. The student filmmakers who covered the years immediately following coeducation also treated the clumsiness of men’s interactions with women; they point to challenges in managing facilities and planning building construction, developing female athletics, and integrating women into extra-curricular clubs and organizations, such as the marching band. <span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1410\" style=\"width: 183px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1410\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image2\" alt=\"Lehigh Student Work\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2-183x250.jpg\" width=\"183\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 2: </em>Alpha Lambda Omega fraternity member list from <em>Epitome</em>, Lehigh’s yearbook (1970, p. 233). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span> The filmmakers who treated contemporary conceptions of masculinity within the Lehigh community explicitly referenced the enduring legacy of sexual inequality and the perceived intellectual inferiority of women. They cited recent newspaper accounts on persistent gender inequities on campus and conducted numerous interviews on the topic. While it may very well have been unintentional, these students never interviewed a male and female subject together; instead, they consistently showed pairs of male students, suggesting the extant homosocial culture of Lehigh.\r\n\r\nI wanted my students to engage the history and culture of Lehigh through film technology because it would provide them with an opportunity to artistically synthesize a variety of different kinds of texts (photos, newspaper articles, found film footage, interviews, etc.). The film medium also allowed my students to share their work in public forums, respond to questions and concerns, and discuss their own research and artistic strategies. In effect, the film project allowed my students to contribute to the very institutional history of Lehigh University that they were researching. The archival work my students completed for this film has effectively introduced them to both the depths of information housed in Lehigh’s Special Collections and the profound relevance of institutional history to their own educational experiences. As I reflect upon the experience, there is no doubt in my mind that the most important single component of this process was done long before this class started; the cataloguing and digitization of the university newspaper and annual yearbooks made such a classroom project possible. The film has allowed students, faculty, and alumni to look back into Lehigh’s past, and, while this project has undoubtedly opened some uncomfortable topics and discussions, it has also reminded current and former members of the Lehigh community of their shared history.\r\n<div><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1390\" style=\"width: 133px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1390\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image3\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3-133x250.jpg\" width=\"133\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 3: </em>A Lehigh student dances with his date at a mixer (<em>Epitome</em> 1970, p.252). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1391\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image4.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1391\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image4\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image4-333x233.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"233\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 4: </em>Photograph of the Class of 1948’s 15th reunion (1963). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1392\" style=\"width: 239px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1392\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image5\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5-239x250.jpg\" width=\"239\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 5: </em>Cartoon by Gene Mater in <em>The Brown &amp; White</em> (September 14, 1971). Image courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1393\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1393\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image6\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6-333x245.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"245\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 6: </em>Student Gene Mater speaking out at a student event (<em>Epitome</em> 1970, p.40). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span></div>','Michael Kramp','My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. ','inherit','open','open','','1110-revision-11','','','2013-07-01 02:38:37','2013-07-01 02:38:37','',1110,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1110-revision-11/',0,'revision','',0),(4959,1,'2013-07-01 02:38:55','2013-07-01 02:38:55','My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. While it was not my initial intention, I was extremely pleased by the students’ abilities to research and study their own school’s history. They made extensive use of Lehigh’s Archives and Special Collections to collect numerous articles, documents, and perhaps most importantly, photographs, and they incorporated these materials into the different sections of the film (see Figures 1-6, below). Students discovered several cultural texts from the 1960s and 1970s that portrayed Lehigh as a haven for privileged masculinity, a sphere in which men appeared largely ignorant of the volatile civil rights movement and the emergent mid-century women’s movement. And yet, my students’ research also revealed that the Lehigh community of this era was also clearly cognizant of impending social changes. As my students tracked this tension between the ossification of male hegemony and the certainty of coming shifts, they developed a newfound appreciation for the importance of institutional history to the present operations of a university.\r\n\r\n<span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1388\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1388\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image1\" alt=\"The Trade with Cedar Crest.\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1-333x159.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"159\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 1: </em>The Trade with Cedar Crest. From Lehigh’s student newspaper, <em>The Brown &amp; White</em> (September 17, 1971). Image courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.</span></span>The prominence of Greek life is certainly one such feature of this legacy. Two of the four segments of the film address the role of fraternities and Greek social life, including the final section, which focuses on men and masculinity in Lehigh’s contemporary culture. The students who explored Lehigh’s mid-century Greek culture found ample textual evidence of its importance, including photographs, yearbook coverage, and film footage. When students interviewed alumni from the 1960s and 1970s, the men reported that Greek life had waned significantly in the years following coeducation. But when other students spoke with current male and female students, these individuals emphasized the enduring importance of fraternities and sororities to the culture of Lehigh. <span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1410\" style=\"width: 183px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1410\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image2\" alt=\"Lehigh Student Work\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2-183x250.jpg\" width=\"183\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 2: </em>Alpha Lambda Omega fraternity member list from <em>Epitome</em>, Lehigh’s yearbook (1970, p. 233). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span> In addition, the group of filmmakers who focused on the period prior to coeducation highlighted the ways in which women were brought to campus for Saturday evening social events such as dances. My students interviewed several alumni who commented on the awkwardness of such activities, for both the men and the women. They even include a telling newspaper story in which Cedar Crest College, a small women’s college in nearby Allentown, is referenced as the bordello of Lehigh Valley. The student filmmakers who covered the years immediately following coeducation also treated the clumsiness of men’s interactions with women; they point to challenges in managing facilities and planning building construction, developing female athletics, and integrating women into extra-curricular clubs and organizations, such as the marching band. The filmmakers who treated contemporary conceptions of masculinity within the Lehigh community explicitly referenced the enduring legacy of sexual inequality and the perceived intellectual inferiority of women. They cited recent newspaper accounts on persistent gender inequities on campus and conducted numerous interviews on the topic. While it may very well have been unintentional, these students never interviewed a male and female subject together; instead, they consistently showed pairs of male students, suggesting the extant homosocial culture of Lehigh.\r\n\r\nI wanted my students to engage the history and culture of Lehigh through film technology because it would provide them with an opportunity to artistically synthesize a variety of different kinds of texts (photos, newspaper articles, found film footage, interviews, etc.). The film medium also allowed my students to share their work in public forums, respond to questions and concerns, and discuss their own research and artistic strategies. In effect, the film project allowed my students to contribute to the very institutional history of Lehigh University that they were researching. The archival work my students completed for this film has effectively introduced them to both the depths of information housed in Lehigh’s Special Collections and the profound relevance of institutional history to their own educational experiences. As I reflect upon the experience, there is no doubt in my mind that the most important single component of this process was done long before this class started; the cataloguing and digitization of the university newspaper and annual yearbooks made such a classroom project possible. The film has allowed students, faculty, and alumni to look back into Lehigh’s past, and, while this project has undoubtedly opened some uncomfortable topics and discussions, it has also reminded current and former members of the Lehigh community of their shared history.\r\n<div><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1390\" style=\"width: 133px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1390\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image3\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3-133x250.jpg\" width=\"133\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 3: </em>A Lehigh student dances with his date at a mixer (<em>Epitome</em> 1970, p.252). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1391\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image4.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1391\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image4\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image4-333x233.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"233\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 4: </em>Photograph of the Class of 1948’s 15th reunion (1963). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1392\" style=\"width: 239px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1392\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image5\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5-239x250.jpg\" width=\"239\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 5: </em>Cartoon by Gene Mater in <em>The Brown &amp; White</em> (September 14, 1971). Image courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1393\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1393\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image6\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6-333x245.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"245\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 6: </em>Student Gene Mater speaking out at a student event (<em>Epitome</em> 1970, p.40). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span></div>','Michael Kramp','My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. ','inherit','open','open','','1110-revision-12','','','2013-07-01 02:38:55','2013-07-01 02:38:55','',1110,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1110-revision-12/',0,'revision','',0),(4960,1,'2013-07-01 02:39:11','2013-07-01 02:39:11','My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. While it was not my initial intention, I was extremely pleased by the students’ abilities to research and study their own school’s history. They made extensive use of Lehigh’s Archives and Special Collections to collect numerous articles, documents, and perhaps most importantly, photographs, and they incorporated these materials into the different sections of the film (see Figures 1-6, below). Students discovered several cultural texts from the 1960s and 1970s that portrayed Lehigh as a haven for privileged masculinity, a sphere in which men appeared largely ignorant of the volatile civil rights movement and the emergent mid-century women’s movement. And yet, my students’ research also revealed that the Lehigh community of this era was also clearly cognizant of impending social changes. As my students tracked this tension between the ossification of male hegemony and the certainty of coming shifts, they developed a newfound appreciation for the importance of institutional history to the present operations of a university.\r\n\r\n<span class=\"right alignright\" id=\"attachment_1388\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1388\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image1\" alt=\"The Trade with Cedar Crest.\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1-333x159.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"159\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 1: </em>The Trade with Cedar Crest. From Lehigh’s student newspaper, <em>The Brown &amp; White</em> (September 17, 1971). Image courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.</span></span>The prominence of Greek life is certainly one such feature of this legacy. Two of the four segments of the film address the role of fraternities and Greek social life, including the final section, which focuses on men and masculinity in Lehigh’s contemporary culture. The students who explored Lehigh’s mid-century Greek culture found ample textual evidence of its importance, including photographs, yearbook coverage, and film footage. When students interviewed alumni from the 1960s and 1970s, the men reported that Greek life had waned significantly in the years following coeducation. But when other students spoke with current male and female students, these individuals emphasized the enduring importance of fraternities and sororities to the culture of Lehigh. <span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1410\" style=\"width: 183px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1410\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image2\" alt=\"Lehigh Student Work\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2-183x250.jpg\" width=\"183\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 2: </em>Alpha Lambda Omega fraternity member list from <em>Epitome</em>, Lehigh’s yearbook (1970, p. 233). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span> In addition, the group of filmmakers who focused on the period prior to coeducation highlighted the ways in which women were brought to campus for Saturday evening social events such as dances. My students interviewed several alumni who commented on the awkwardness of such activities, for both the men and the women. They even include a telling newspaper story in which Cedar Crest College, a small women’s college in nearby Allentown, is referenced as the bordello of Lehigh Valley. The student filmmakers who covered the years immediately following coeducation also treated the clumsiness of men’s interactions with women; they point to challenges in managing facilities and planning building construction, developing female athletics, and integrating women into extra-curricular clubs and organizations, such as the marching band. The filmmakers who treated contemporary conceptions of masculinity within the Lehigh community explicitly referenced the enduring legacy of sexual inequality and the perceived intellectual inferiority of women. They cited recent newspaper accounts on persistent gender inequities on campus and conducted numerous interviews on the topic. While it may very well have been unintentional, these students never interviewed a male and female subject together; instead, they consistently showed pairs of male students, suggesting the extant homosocial culture of Lehigh.\r\n\r\nI wanted my students to engage the history and culture of Lehigh through film technology because it would provide them with an opportunity to artistically synthesize a variety of different kinds of texts (photos, newspaper articles, found film footage, interviews, etc.). The film medium also allowed my students to share their work in public forums, respond to questions and concerns, and discuss their own research and artistic strategies. In effect, the film project allowed my students to contribute to the very institutional history of Lehigh University that they were researching. The archival work my students completed for this film has effectively introduced them to both the depths of information housed in Lehigh’s Special Collections and the profound relevance of institutional history to their own educational experiences. As I reflect upon the experience, there is no doubt in my mind that the most important single component of this process was done long before this class started; the cataloguing and digitization of the university newspaper and annual yearbooks made such a classroom project possible. The film has allowed students, faculty, and alumni to look back into Lehigh’s past, and, while this project has undoubtedly opened some uncomfortable topics and discussions, it has also reminded current and former members of the Lehigh community of their shared history.\r\n<div><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1390\" style=\"width: 133px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1390\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image3\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3-133x250.jpg\" width=\"133\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 3: </em>A Lehigh student dances with his date at a mixer (<em>Epitome</em> 1970, p.252). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1391\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image4.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1391\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image4\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image4-333x233.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"233\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 4: </em>Photograph of the Class of 1948’s 15th reunion (1963). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1392\" style=\"width: 239px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1392\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image5\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5-239x250.jpg\" width=\"239\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 5: </em>Cartoon by Gene Mater in <em>The Brown &amp; White</em> (September 14, 1971). Image courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span class=\"left alignleft\" id=\"attachment_1393\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1393\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image6\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6-333x245.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"245\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 6: </em>Student Gene Mater speaking out at a student event (<em>Epitome</em> 1970, p.40). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span></div>','Michael Kramp','My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. ','inherit','open','open','','1110-revision-13','','','2013-07-01 02:39:11','2013-07-01 02:39:11','',1110,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1110-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),