This past November the Final Report of the Lighting the Way Project “Facilitating and Illuminating Emergent Futures for Archival Discovery and Delivery” was published.

Abstract

“Between September 2019 and August 2021, Stanford University Libraries facilitated Lighting the Way: illuminating the future of discovery and delivery for archives, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The project focused on exploring how networks of people and technology impact archival discovery and delivery (how people find, access, and use material from archives and special collections). The project focused on engaging directly with practitioners – archives, library, and technology workers – involved in this work, across roles, job functions, areas of expertise, and levels of positional power. The project’s goals included mapping the ecosystem of archival discovery and delivery; developing conceptual and actionable recommendations for technical, ethical, and practical concerns; building a shared understanding between practitioners responsible for this work; and activating a diverse group of project participants to adopt the recommendations and findings developed during the project.”

Analysis of document

As I read this document, I felt that there is a lot we could take away from their findings and recommendations, not just in relation to archival discovery and delivery, but throughout our library practices and culture, such as utilizing “liberating structures” and “strategy knotwork” for engaging in collaborative discussions and planning.  Below are some key take-aways from the report, but I encourage y’all to read it, too.

• Project Site: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/lightingtheway
• Deliverables: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/lightingtheway/browse/project-deliverables
• This report: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/lightingtheway/catalog/jm302fq5311

Discoveries

1. Viewing archival discovery as an ecosystem of systems and people
2. The interconnection between collaboration, power, and organizational positioning of this work
3. The value of care-focused, generative facilitation methods to strategic planning for archival programs
4. The importance of early-stage collaboration and communities of practice to support similar efforts.

Recommendations

1. Develop new communities of practice that work in alignment with existing ones
2. Prioritize collaborative opportunities for strategy that explore new working relationship
3. Adopt and apply generative and care-focused facilitation methods to inform strategic planning
4. Understand the resourcing required and value the labor necessary to undertake strategic opportunities.

Key Concepts

“This work is necessarily performed by people in a variety of roles – not just archives workers, but library workers, technology workers, and others with varying skill sets, areas of expertise, levels of responsibility, and positional power within their institutions.”

“Integration is the use of processes or tools to join systems to work together as a coordinated whole, which provides a “functional coupling” between systems.”

• There are a wide variety of systems that support archival discovery and delivery, and they are deeply interconnected even when not well-integrated
• While accurately understood as technical work, systems integration for archival discovery and delivery is impacted by non-technical factors
• Most archives workers are only familiar with the systems that they use individually, making broader strategic discussions more challenging
• While archival discovery and delivery is rarely perfect or complete at any institution or repository, archives workers usually only report about work when given phases are complete

Table 1. Applying strategy knotworking to Working Meeting activities

Resources

• https://www.zotero.org/groups/2371748/lighting_the_way_forum/library
• https://keithmccandless.medium.com/liberating-strategy-6fda41f6c1
• https://medium.com/the-liberators/strategy-knotworking-turning-ideas-and-ambitions-into-reality-d7f968e79195
• https://twitter.com/dgheath21/status/1218318246971105281
• https://fullcirc.com/2018/09/13/adaptive-strategy-development/

“Reading w/Dan” Announcement

This year as part of an informal personal goal, I am trying to get a handle on and tackle my reading backlog of articles, technical reports, books, etc. With readings I finish I have decided to share interesting tidbits and recommendations with University Libraries colleagues. I had been approaching this by sharing via the Libraries’ Special Collection Forum and All-IT listservs.  Beth Snapp has suggested I use the Libraries’ IT blog as a means of wider dissemination and I concur that is a great idea. To that end I will repackage my existing shares/reviews from earlier this year over the next couple of weeks, and then any new ones will be posted here and on my u.osu.edu page (go.osu.edu/noonan).

Partners for Preservation

I recently completed reading the book, Partners for Preservation: Advancing Digital Preservation through Cross-Community Collaboration edited by Jeanne Kramer-Smyth © 2019.

It is a series of 10 essays split into 3 parts with an introduction and follow-up by the editor. I have bolded and italicized my three favorite essays that I feel also deliver the most useful information.

• Memory, privacy and transparency
  • The inheritance of digital media by Edina Harbinja: When users of social media and other online resources pass, who has the rights to access/own/maintain the data?
  • Curbing the online assimilation of personal information by Paulan Korenhof: “The RTBF [Right To Be Forgotten] is meant to aid individuals in moving beyond their past in the current information age by erasing information that ‘with the passing of time becomes decontextualized, distorted, outdated, no longer truthful (but not necessarily false)”
  • The rise of computer-assisted reporting: challenges and successes by Brant Houston: “The rise in the number of journalists analysing data with the use of computers and software began in the mid-1980s. Widely known as computer-assisted reporting, the practice started in the USA with a handful of journalists in the late 1970s, grew significantly in the 1980s, spread to western Europe in the 1990s, and then to the rest of the world in the early 21st century. During its rise, the name for the practice has varied, with some researchers seeing an evolution of the practice with a different name for each era.”
  • Link rot, reference rot and the thorny problems of legal citation by Ellie Margolis: Explores the need for accurate legal citations as provenance for laws. Ironically, one of the legally resources cited had moved and the link provided had died of “link rot.”
• The physical world: objects, art and architecture
  • The Internet of Things: the risks and impacts of ubiquitous computing by Éireann Leverett: “At its core, the Internet of Things is ‘ubiquitous computing’, tiny computers everywhere – outdoors, at work in the countryside, at use in the city, floating on the sea, or in the sky – for all kinds of real world purposes…All of these purposes initially seem logical, and even business critical to the users, yet each of them involves decisions about security and privacy with incredibly long lasting and far-reaching implications.” “The Internet of Things often rejects standard business models Entirely…But with the Internet of Things, a variation of the freemium model applies. We expect services for free (or at least as cheap as Internet of Things devices). The companies make money from the data we generate”
  • Accurate digital colour reproduction on  displays: from hardware design to software features by Abhijit Sarkar: Provides a concise explanation of color spaces and why color management is important in the GLAM communities
  • Historical BIM+: sharing, preserving and reusing architectural design data by Ju Hyun Lee and Ning Gu: Explores the complexity of architectural design in the virtual environment
• Data and programming
  • Preparing and releasing official statistical data by Natalie Shlomo
  • Sharing research data, data standards and improving opportunities for creating visualisations by Vetria Byrd: A good primer on the steps that go into data visualization
  • Open source, version control and software sustainability by Ildikó Vancsa: An excellent summation of the open source software development process.

Partners for Preservation is an e-book available from The Ohio State University Libraries (https://library.ohio-state.edu/search/t?SEARCH=Partners+for+Preservation+&searchscope=7) for students, staff, faculty and alumni.