Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management

Until 1990 (and onwards until this paper) relatively little effort was made to understand the users and usage of archives and archival methods. It was assumed that it was archivists and historians that know their way around.

The actual user base has changed in the last thirty years:

“a significant portion of visitors are at the moment people looking for information instead of data” (Huvila, 2008, p. 17)

The differentiation between information and data is relevant. Archivist and historians are gather information from data themselves, whereas others often don’t have the necessary skills, knowledge or processes at hand to do so.

The change in user base is linked to the growth of records, but also new services and of course, digitization. Further, the public’s stance towards archives has changed.

“Following the argument of Ketelaar (1992), archives and information are more of the people, by the people, and for the people than the people are for the archives.” (Huvila, 2008, p. 18)

In a post-modern view, the neutrality of an archive isn’t given anymore. There is a pluriverse of viewpoints at hands.

Digital archives at Saari Manor and Kajaani Castle

Methods and strategy

• unstructured expert interviews
• requirement engineering, validated with experts and potential user group (n=15)
• qualitative document analysis (Altheide)
• development of indexing and classification

“The central themes which appeared in the discussions were geographical dispersion of individual users, existence of multiple parallel viewpoints, interpretations of each information object, variety of the types of relevant information objects (ranging from manuscripts to physical objects and measurement data), and the fact that expertise in different aspects of the information objects was held by different individuals.” (Huvila, 2008, p. 20)

This snippet feels so relevant…

Findings, Requirements

The following requirements were extracted from the “principal findings” (Huvila, 2008, p. 20).

• Multiuser browsing, editing, and maintenance
• Versions and tracking of changes on the level of individual contributors
• Flexibility of data and structure
• Flexibility of description
• Searchability and formalisation of decriptions
• Standard file formats
• Standard, inexpensive, and easily transferable software

From an infrastructural view, the balance between flexibility part is extremely interesting. It seems to be about including unknown future cases. In the end they chose a the semantic mediawiki as base for their platform :)

Envisioning a participatory archive

• self-steering, as in crowd
• emphasis on collaborativeness and conversationality of archive building
• easy entry and total findability
• supervision has only maintenance function, not value judgment or facilitation

“Unlike in the access paradigm of Menne-Haritz (2001), a participatory archive pursues transparency through participation and not its opposite. Inclusion and greater participation are supposed to reveal a diversity of motivations, viewpoints, arguments and counterarguments, which become transparent when a critical mass is attained.” (Huvila, 2008, p. 25)

Further, a participatory archive is characterized by

1. Decentralized curation
2. Radical user orientation
3. Contextualization of both records and the entire archival process

Infrastructural participation:

“In a participatory archive, the usability does not denote use alone, but also denotes a deeper level of involvement in the sense of actual participation in the archive and in the archival process.” (Huvila, 2008, p. 25)

A similar project incorporates participatory approaches through functions like “commenting, collaborative filtering, bookmarking, and visitor awareness” (Huvila, 2008, p. 25). User awareness is implemented differently in the present study and regarded through “following changes and contributions rather than browsing and the movement throughout a site” (Huvila, 2008, p. 26). There is importance in what user engagement is tracked and categorized as participatory. See also Nick Seaver on user tracking (Seaver, 2021).

There is a lot to unpack in the described differences between the “participatory archiving model” (Huvila, 2008, p. 26) by Shilton and Srinivasan and the proposed participatory archive. I’ll include the text directly.

“The first difference in the approaches is that Shilton and Srinivasan seem to discuss essentially building, appraisal, provenance, ordering and description of an archival collection, and participatory development of archival ontologies instead of working with an archive as an evolving corpus of process-bound information with self-emerging ontologies. The second major difference is that in the participatory archiving model, communities are an actor, and the archive will be based on a consensual community ontology of the participating community members set within a theoretical framework based on archival science. In a participatory archive, there is no predetermined consensual community. The `community’ is a sum of all individual structures, descriptions, orders, and viewpoints contributed by individual participating archive users whether they are users or contributors, archivists, researchers, administrators, labourers, or belong to marginalised communities or the majority. The proposed role for information managers is to maintain the technical platform, to provide adequate tools for working with the archive and to provide a minimum technical level of findability of individual records. Otherwise than from the technical point of view, information managers are equal to the other users of the archive. Their role is not to direct the process of how an archive emerges, how something is described or appraised or what provenances relate to the materials.” (Huvila, 2008, p. 26)

It essentially boils down to who has the authority to manage the archives content – the archivists or the community.

“postcontrolled” (Huvila, 2008, p. 26) 😍

Seen from this vantage point, enabling users to simply contact the archive through mail or contact forms (as seen with many participatory archive projects) is simply not enough. The discussion and authority of publicity still lies within the archive and the public is excluded.

The role of the archivist in a participatory archive shifts and is still crucial. See “responsibilities” (Huvila, 2008, p. 27).

Discussion and conclusion

Yes… that’s the gist of it

“The most essential question regarding a participatory archive is whether it works or not: whether the users contribute to an archive and whether the contributions create added value. According to the earlier studies on collaborative digital information repositories, the functional sustainability of a repository is highly dependent on the activity of archive users and the emergence of a culture of collaboration, integration into daily practises, and a critical mass to sustain necessary level of contributions, which obliges others to contribute (Peddibhotla and Subramani 2007; Hollingshead et al. 2002; Dingsøyr and Røyrvik 2003).” (Huvila, 2008, p. 30)