Preserving the Memory of the World
Yesterday was the second annual symposium of the UBC chapter of the Association of Canadian Archivists. This year’s theme was Preserving the Memory of the World and featured folks from a variety of institutions all over the world. I enjoyed hearing about UNESCO initiatives the World Digital Library and the Memory of the World Programme, as well as a presentation about the MotW Jikji prize winner, the National Archives of Malaysia. Issues of translation — both linguistic and cultural — and recordkeeping and heritage initiatives in the developing world kept coming up. In Brian Thurgood’s talk about international standards, he noted that a lot of interest in recordkeeping standards has been coming from developing nations. Malaysian national archivist Dato Sidek, when asked about his optimism in a famously complaining profession, simply stated that you have to stay positive in the archives. Things are gonna be bad, so you just have to figure out the best way to make things work.
Social media came up repeatedly throughout the day. Johanna Smith’s presentation on recordkeeping in social networking environments focused on Library and Archives Canada’s initiatives looking at social media in government. It struck me that a lot still comes back to John MacDonald’s Wild Frontier: as long as recordkeeping occurs on the desktop — or the BlackBerry or the mobile phone — archivists are always going to be chasing down records from many steps behind. Babek Hamidizeh mentioned that the World Digital Library has some focus on creating formats available to mobile devices, because in many parts of the world, that is simply the way that people get online. What seems like a gimmick in Canada may be a necessity in other places.
The most provocative speaker of the day was George Blood from the Safe Sound Archive, whose talk had a last-minute change in its title to “METADATA: Gallactic Domination is Just the Beginning.” I’ve spent part of the last week sweating over the data dictionary for the digital library I’m working on, so it was very gratifying to hear Blood ask some hard questions about resource description. Like: how much metadata is enough? (He joked that the only answers are: “I don’t know!” or “More!”) Is there such a thing as too much metadata? What about if the metadata is bigger than the object being described? (This reminded me of Umberto Eco’s essay about “On the impossibility of drawing a map of the empire on a scale of 1 to 1” in How to Travel with a Salmon.) Blood pointed out that we don’t really know how much it helps users to add more metadata. One recurring joke all day was that standards are like toothbrushes: everyone agrees they’re important, but no one wants to use someone else’s. Blood pointed out that even when metadata standards get used, they are rarely applied consistently: what happens when an institution uses a field in a different way, or adds their own elements? We really don’t know. He drove this home by noting that, for a field that professes to avoid proprietary solutions, we use metadata in a generally incompatible way.
I had to duck out before the last few speakers, but it was a great event. Props to the ACA student chapter, faculty, and speakers who made it happen. I can’t wait to see what they come up with for next year.
