IISG Symposium on Collecting Sources for Social History (semi-live blog; Part 3)
December 15th, 2008 by JimMarcel van der Linden (Director of Research) begins the session which will be focused on “the future”.
Reads the future section from the overview paper
“What will the future look like for the IISH and similar institutions? It seems safe to depart from the idea that for one or more generations to come national states will be the key players −
notwithstanding globalization of all sorts. Let us suppose for a moment that there will be enough democracies amongst them where our sort of institutes can exist. If that is the case, the ideal of the trias informatica will remain the underlying imperative. At the same time, competing and conflicting forces just mentioned (academic, political and international) will remain important. The question on the table is how best to develop the IISH as a collection-building institution with a global role in this landscape of the future, to develop a coherent vision that can be translated into clear choices in terms of mission, organisation, and resource allocation. It is for this that we solicit your advice.”
Three areas of concern
- digitilazation (what should be captured and kept, who takes responsibility etc.) and its impact on our future work?
- will the relation between researchers and archivists change in the future?
- does international cooperation have to take a new shape for the future?
The discussion begins with some ‘interventions’.
We are already in the era of digital information. Position of the IISH is to build a trusted digital repository (TDR) to preserve born digital materials from their usual sources (trade unions,
economic organizations, political parties, etc.). IISH will NOT harvest and archive web sites. They will rely on national libraries and the Internet Archive (have done some tests and are impressed with the coverage in their areas). Web sites are public information; their efforts should go to archiving ‘private’ information e.g. intranets of organizations and email within movements. Is this position tenable? Have been criticized because some social movements manifest themselves on the web in a very emphemeral way. This is also a departure from the past when published materials as well as private materials were collected and archived.
Trusted digital repository issues are different than those encountered with government records. The government can set standards and procedures for deposit but that’s not possible with private organizations and individuals. The TDR must be able to handle all types. The IISH is considering support for self-archiving by giving a toolkit and best practices to the organizations whose information they want to collect and archive. There is also the issue of authenticity for those materials being archived. How can the IISH manage that responsibility?
Additional problem noted - most organizations don’t consider their electronic materials part of their archive in addition when they do think of this they consider their email much more sensitive than their traditional paper archives.
Some worry about the real long-term maintenance, the disappearance of formats, etc. The solutions favor large public institutions and put small private organizations at a disadvantage. If you take advantage of large state-sponsored solutions you may put the important archives back into the hands of the dominant culture. This raises all the concerns about sensitivity and ethics from yesterday’s discussion. Does this mean that these type of social history institutions whose materials have special sensitivities will need to cooperate to build their own TDR free of concerns about putting materials back under state control?
While hesitant to say it in this group, perhaps we should rely on the market to provide solutions from which we can then select?
Adding to the problem, even when you manage to store these large quantities of data you then have to create new forms of description and access. The traditional forms of archival management will not be effective or appropriate any longer.
That said, perhaps we should not panic too soon. In practice we have seen local solutions emerge in the long-run and overcome the perceived imperative to centralize. Lots of people have this problem and because of that there will be significant investment that then presents a choice of solutions. Information loss has always occurred, we should work hard to minimize it, but we should not panic.
Two big questions coming from Blue Ribbon task force - Who is responsible? Who will pay? The response is likely to be very similar to the ways in which we answered those questions in regard to traditional print materials. Subsidy and grant funding have been the traditional modes that will persist into the future.
The big issue in a centralized solution even a cooperative one among social history organizations is about trust i.e. a record that might violate a law in the USA might be perfectly benign under French law. Trust might be there but the legal regimes might not support that trust.
This trust problem is the one with which we should be concerned. The others are ones that we share with everybody else. There must be places where you can keep archives out of the control of other people. This is a different trust than is meant in the phrase ‘trusted digitial repository’ where it means reliable, suited to the purpose, etc. For the trust being discussed here we need a different set of interactions and agreements.
MOVING on to the question of the changing relation between researchers and collectors.
Many collectors began as researchers - so what do you mean by researcher? It includes both the independent and academy-based producers of new knowledge.
Many researchers just imagine that the collections are just there. They don’t know how they are built or financed, etc. A lot of researchers collect but they build personal research collections only for their own use. Some of those do get donated to archives.
Researchers think the best thing archives can do for them is to provide the richest possible searching environment. If that’s available the researcher can make their own judgments about what is relevant and useful. We should build the collections and provide rich search. But we need to make the materials citable and traceable.
The pathological collector with a propensity to pinch is discussed. Everybody has the theft problem.
Independent of changing research fashions, traditional collecting strengths must be kept up. This causes tension between researchers and collectors when the researcher needs and demands material to support the current interest array.
What’s the current patterns of researcher involvement in collection development? [Here a bunch of folks talk about their local situation]
The discussion turns to cooperation. Can cooperate technically but more imporant is the physical networking. The International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI) brings together archives, libraries, documentation centres, museums and research institutions specializing in the history and theory of the labour movement from all over the world. This is one venue. But cyberconferences and web-based networking is an important component to supplement the face-to-face.
A different approach might be to have conferences and workshops that involve both the representatives of collecting institutions as well as the members of the movements whose work is
being collected.
What are the substantive issues that need cooperative action? Digital archiving might be one although there isn’t a clear idea of what the specific areas for collective action might be.
The idea of developing tool kits to allow the creators of archives to self-archive has a number of supporters. Having a small group of institutional representatives come together to work on
this and propose a way forward might be a good follow-up to this symposium. Apparently there is already some work like this underway in Belgium. There is some scepticism that the creators would actually use practices and tools provided to them.
Some people think that there needs to be a more formal network of interaction among these social history institutions. Others think that a meta-portal that allows discovery across the holdings of these institutions would be a good idea. Others think that just making sure users know which institutions exist is important - there should be a registry where researchers can discover that you exist and then there should be some kind of meta-discovery.
What’s different about this gathering is that it brings together researchers and representatives of the archival institutions. There are lots of places where archival professional matters are discussed. Lots of places where the technical issues are being joined. We should figure out what is distinctive about this group that makes it suitable for further action.
There is some discussion about how different the problems faced by collecting institutions in The South are. Some of the technical challenges raised by digitalization are not as important to them. The urgency is around paper and storage.
Is there anything that an organized international grouping of institutions could do to raise the profile and importance of these types of social history institutions?
The International Labor Organization, a UN agency, should be covering at least part of this challenge but they seem to be ineffective. They are only beginning to be sensitive about history.
There is discussion about best practices for these types of institutions. How much is codified? How much needs to be brought together? Etc.
There is concern that this diverts from energy that is going into IALHI. Should encourage and strengthen their efforts rather than launch another one.
The notion of a meta-portal for social history is questioned. Would researchers use it? How effective can it possibly be? This is another reason to think that gatherings that bring researchers and archivists together would actually be very useful.
Portals may represent good advertising for an institution but may not be very effective to actual researchers.
Ensuring that these collecting institutions appear at the professional gatherings of researchers might be a very good idea. There would be two-way learning and exposition from this attendance.
Some debate and misunderstanding about what it means to put things on the web and be open. Does this cause a problem with donor restrictions etc.? No. You honor your donor obligations regardless.
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Wrap-up and summary by Erik-Jan Zürcher (General Director).
Will summarize based on his notoriously bad hand-writing. Realizes this has been a unique series of meetings. Unusual to have such a concentrated conversation with the institutions who share a similar collecting mission.
IISH has 50km of archives, 1M books and 200K posters.
Three triangles. A triangle of triangles. Different levels of depth and duration.
The first triangle is about the forces facing the IISH: globalizaion, digitalization, and accountability
The IISH has a global labor history aspiration but doesn’t have the in-house expertise yet wishes to acquire it. The collections have had a North Atlantic focus where there are now solid, well-equipped respositories and the movements the Institute tracks have become more or less institutionalized. Means the IISH has less reason and demand to collect here. At the same the global South has a growing need
This led to a call for a staff change and policy change in order to address the global South consisting of a new collector/senior researcher positions along with regional representatives to advance collecting in these new areas.
Digitilization is an emerging responsibility which will be pursued through digitizing their core collections, provision of a TDR and of
Accountability means reaching out and increasing the visibility of IISH with the general public and with funding agencies.
Technological change means re-skilling and re-tooling on all three of these areas.
The second triangle is around the logics underlying collecting policies - the logic of continuity (need for completion and extension), the logic of research, and the logic of rescue. These logics are constrained around finances particulary for acquisition (these have been halved over the last decade in real terms). The role of digitalization goes beyond showing the collections. Web 2.0 extends the involvement of scholars and users in the description of the collections and allows the collection knowledge of senior IISH staff can be captured this way.
Jan Lucassen in explaining the current exhibition showed how it is also a tool to show the logic of the IISH collections. The origins are in the interests of the founder which were around Dutch Economic History which extended to the origins of capitalism and the markets. This evolved to interests in early modern industrial archives and eventually to social history. In comparing Western European market emergence with Eastern Europe there was a connection to the resistance to the spread of capitalism which included the revolutions of the early 18th and 19th centuries. Development of capitalism on the one hand and on the other the resistance efforts are the foundation of the 19th and 20th century social movements. From the 1980s onward the IISH went beyond Europe to an interest in Middle East and Southeast Asia (which overlapped with colonialism and anti-colonialism interests). Finally this overlaps with global movements like environmentalism, etc.
This was all background to thinking about the future of the IISH collections which are judged ‘excellent’ by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science the funding body of the IISH.
A compliment of the highest order to Jaap Kloosterman’s leadership of the Institute’s collecting which made this into a world famous institution of its kind. The collections are central to the mission and functioning of the IISH. They are coherent and consistent.
The review committee noted that the proposed data hubs are central to the future collecting of the Institute - they are the future form of archival collecting in social economics and labor history.
The committee characterized collecting forces for IISH along two axes - collections and research. Collections are motivated by continuity spreading along to rescue. Research ranges from core to new. They arrayed the interests of the IISH within this graph.
The IISH investment in ICT must be regarded as fundamental expense. It is core not incremental. IISH has invested early and well and achieved a leadership position. Another compliment to Jaap’s foresight.
Acknowledging that now people work within the web and the network environments the IISH is knowingly making investments in disclosing our assets in these places.
The symposium was organized around the second triangle - the trias informatica which consists of the state, the media and the academy. In the overview paper the underlying assumption was of a civil society. This opened the concept to some criticism. The overestimation of the independence of the media was also mentioned many times.
Missing from the trias informatica are the producers of the actual information, those in the movements etc.
Relation between producers and the collecting institutions was the theme of the discussion of political considerations. The tension in the IISH responsibility to adherre to the logic of rescue while still honoring the heritage character of the archives collected was highlighted. This tension exists for all collecting institutions.
Institutions like IISH are in relations with both people with the social movements and the users where openness and impartiality are critical.
Digitilization may play a role in easing the heritage tension by making it possible to provide effective and useful copies. Providing producers with the ability to create and share their own histories may be another way to ensure that our cultural perspective doesn’t overwhelm. This might mean providing training and toolkits.
Security and privacy issues are always high for organizations like IISH. Much of the discussion here centered around unintended consequences. Consider the UNESCO example.
The relationship between researchers and collections was judged to be quite complex. Often researchers become some of the most knowledgeable collectors. Without researchers there is no sensible collection development policy. The pure perspective of researchers and collection builders are very different. Time horizons for each group are different. We must be sensitive that we respond to researchers while not abandoning the continuity of our collections.
International considerations centered around the repatriation of materials and in particular about the moral defensibility of taking materials out of country. My rescue is your plunder.
The provision of copies or the offer to return when institutions in country emerge may mitigate these concerns. Preference should always be to have the materials collected and maintained dependably within the home country.
Finally the last session looking at the future covered many of the previous issues but added reflections on international cooperation. Some cooperation is around digitization, some around best practices, some around collecting, some around actual face-to-face interactions.
There was some overlap between the committee and the symposium. Where that happened it reinforces the IISH focus and the kind of investments it makes.
Two final remarks - in this fast-changing economic environment we can certainly expect funding challenges which will extend to all of our institutions. This downturn will also result in new materials to be collected as resistance and reaction to the crisis develop.
Finally this symposium had the imprint of Jaap Kloosterman. This was a meeting of his circle and his institutions and that focused on issues that he shaped. I wish him the best as he returns to his academic life and full-time research work.
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