Anne J. Gilliland

Comparing faculty information seeking in teaching and research: Implications for the design of digital libraries

ADEPT is a 5-year project whose goals are to develop, deploy, and evaluate inquiry learning capabilities for the Alexandria Digital Library, an extant digital library of primary sources in geography. We interviewed nine geography faculty members who teach undergraduate courses about their information seeking for research and teaching and their use of information resources in teaching. These data were supplemented by interviews with four faculty members from another ADEPT study about the nature of knowledge in geography. Among our key findings are that geography faculty are more likely to encounter useful teaching resources while seeking research resources than vice versa, although the influence goes in both directions. Their greatest information needs are for research data, maps, and images. They desire better searching by concept or theme, in addition to searching by location and place name. They make extensive use of their own research resources in their teaching. Among the implications for functionality and architecture of geographic digital libraries for educational use are that personal digital libraries are essential, because individual faculty members have personalized approaches to selecting, collecting, and organizing teaching resources. Digital library services for research and teaching should include the ability to import content from common office software and to store content in standard formats that can be exported to other applications. Digital library services can facilitate sharing among faculty but cannot overcome barriers such as intellectual property rights, access to proprietary research data, or the desire of individuals to maintain control over their own resources. Faculty use of primary and secondary resources needs to be better understood if we are to design successful digital libraries for research and teaching.

WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES: Community partnership research in information technology, management and systems

From a research perspective, enhancing our understanding of interactions between people, the contexts in which they are situated, technologies, systems and information is seen as one of the keys to developing better information technologies, management and systems. When designing and doing research, there is a need to take into account the diversity, dynamics and complexity at play in designing, developing, managing and interacting with information systems, optimizing the use of information technologies and managing information. Undertaking community partnership research relating to information technologies, management and systems is centred on understanding and prioritizing how information and information technologies can empower communities, support their development, resilience, health and well-being, promote self-determination, social inclusion and social justice, and bridge divides. This community-centricity presents challenges, however, for research, researchers and research institutions. They are associated with equitable participation, engagement and co-production; respect and recognition of the rights, needs, values and motivation of all participants and stakeholders, as well as their expertise and ways of knowing; researcher stance; and control over and dissemination of knowledge outcomes. The papers in this special issue explore many of these challenges.

Promoting Reflexivity and Inclusivity in Archival Education, Research, and Practice.

The area of archival studies today transcends the professional field of archival science. It encompasses an ever‐broadening array of disciplinary discussions and methodological approaches that are identifying, critiquing, and addressing the shifting social, cultural, philosophical, and political, as well as the technological, imperatives of record keeping and remembering in the twenty‐first century. Reporting on two recent research projects and three ongoing educational initiatives, this article suggests ways in which research and education in archival studies can play a central role in promoting more reflexive and inclusive ideas, practices, and research, not only within the archival profession, but also within the various library and information science (LIS) and iSchool settings in which archival education and research might be situated.

False promise and new hope: dead perpetrators, imagined documents and emergent archival evidence

When those accused of being high-level perpetrators of human rights abuse die before publicly yielding their secrets in legal and archival arenas, victims may simultaneously express relief about the perpetrators demise and grief that, along with it, possible crucial information about the past is lost forever. Although the accused do not usually directly admit their actions and the teasing out of what actually happened is dependent upon the complex processes of cross-examination of their testimony and of records and other forms of evidence, victims project such moments of revelation onto the public act of holding accused perpetrators to account. In their deaths, the accused become forever-from-now-on unavailable and thus unassailable evidence – in essence; they are transformed into imagined documents that can never be cross-examined. In this construction, the would-be testimony of perpetrators is given epistemological validity over that of victims, offering up the false and unfulfillable promise of establishing a singular truth. Complicating this scenario, however, is the increasingly open-ended hope offered to victims, judicial processes and historians alike by the application of new forensic methods, for example, in the examination of gravesites and human remains, and by satellite footage, that are generating additional categories of evidence. Using the juridical and archival legacies of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Yugoslav Wars as case studies, this article argues that when perpetrators die before giving legal testimony, survivors and victims’ families construct them as unavailable documents with imaginary agency to settle competing versions of history. Such imagined documents enter into a complex landscape of human rights archives that has heretofore been exclusively focused on tangible evidence. First, this article frames the case of Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, who died before giving his testimony in a hybrid tribunal. In the face of diverse archival documentary evidence capable of presenting a more complete and complex picture of atrocities, it contemplates why survivors and victims’ family members placed high hopes on his potential testimony, essentially constructing him as a now-dead living document. Second, it explores a parallel case, that of the death of Slobodan Milošević while being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and argues that the notion of a dead perpetrator as imagined document has less sway when the public has the opportunity to hear the perpetrator defend himself, regardless of the perpetrators own admission (or denial) of culpability. Third, it proposes the notion of imaginary documents. It argues that such imaginary documents challenge dominant conceptions of the evidentiary qualities of tangible records and the archival legacies of trauma by insisting on a more dynamic and holistic view of records that takes the affect of survivors and victims’ family members into account.

Research in the Archival Multiverse

This paper focuses on conceptual frameworks developed in ethnic studies and contemplates what these might contribute in terms of approaching archival and recordkeeping research through an African American lens. The paper explores the epistemological lineage of ethnic studies, its emergence and evolution in the US context; defines and discusses key concepts and contexts salient to ethnic studies, including cultural environments; and comments on the relationships between ethnic studies ideas and those drawn from both traditional and postmodern archival thinking. Lastly, the paper discusses some of the considerations in using conceptual frameworks from ethnic studies in research related to archival practice and recordkeeping in the United States. ... no partial aspect of social life and no isolated phenomenon may be comprehended unless it is related to the historical whole, to the social structure conceived as global entity.

Metadata for the Information Multiverse

In today’s Information Multiverse there are pressing societal, ethical and educational, as well as intellectual reasons why, rather than simplifying and reducing or streamlining, we should actually be complexifying and increasing our efforts to generate metadata that identifies, collocates, contextualizes, authenticates and enfranchises. Such metadata should not only draw upon, but should also simultaneously incorporate re-thinking of fundamental and long-established bibliographic and archival principles in light of the plural and increasingly post-physical nature of the Information Multiverse. Our ongoing research is modeling an Information Multiverse approach to metadata by identifying ways in which these complexified principles can be embedded in local, community and global (i.e., web) metadata infrastructures. Their underlying references to common concepts additionally open up the possibility of interoperability and re-use, and, outside the silos of professional/information fields, linking and

From Prototype to Deployable System: Framing the Adoption of Digital Library Services

The Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype Project (ADEPT) is a 5-year (1999-2004) effort, with a goal of developing effective models for implementing digital libraries in undergraduate instruction. The ADEPT team has created a digital learning environment (DLE) that adds educational value to a digital library by offering a suite of services for teaching. Encouraged by the results of implementations in undergraduate geography classrooms, the team now shifts its focus from experimental prototype to deployable system. Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theories are used as frameworks for analyzing this complex transition. Recommendations for lowering the barriers to adoption related to complexity, trialability, and observability include the prioritization of development efforts focused on stabilizing the system, the creation of documentation and an online demonstration, and anonymous logins to the system. To increase perceived relative advantage, existing technical and copyright issues in integrating the Alexandria Digital Library must be overcome. To increase compatibility, the speed at which pedagogical change is achieved must be rethought. Finally, recruitment efforts should focus on innovators and early adopters before moving on to early majority, late majority, or laggard adopters.

Professional, Institutional, and National Identities in Dialog: The Development of Descriptive Practices in the First Decade of the US National Archives

Drawing upon archival sources, this article reviews the historical background and discourse surrounding early descriptive developments at the US National Archives from 1935 to 1941. It identifies three discursive strands and discusses their implications for archivists today: how local and national differences might temper wholesale adoption of practices employed in other settings; the initial attempt to blend bibliographic and archival approaches at the National Archives; and the conceptualization and subsequent adoption of the record group as an institutional compromise. This compromise embedded conceptual principles identified by European archivists while simultaneously addressing specific pragmatic and physical considerations presented by federal records at the time.

To what lengths the ‘Physical and Moral Defence of the Record’ in times of conflict and exigency?*

Abstract Hilary Jenkinson, Ernst Posner and other archivists in Europe and the US played key and often parallel roles on different sides in the identification and strategic securing of records in Europe during the Second World War. This paper is concerned with the various ways in which archivists, in times of conflict and other exigencies, view and act upon their responsibility to the ‘physical and moral defence of the record.’ Drawing from the author’s ethnographic research, it first briefly reflects on the personal positioning and professional agency of archivists during the Yugoslav Wars and amid today’s continuing ethnic and nationalist politics. It then uses archival sources to examine how these Second World War archivists positioned themselves with regard to their physical and moral obligations to the records, the call of their nations, and their personal circumstances and politics. Finally, it contemplates how these historical examples might help the field to prepare archivists for the realities of acting and advocating on behalf of records, archives and their constituents in situations of conflict and exigency around the globe.