Blog Archive » Archives are a luxury. This post is intended to be provocative, and I think it will make some people angry.
But I think it’s a good idea every once in a while to make people question or defend long-held ideas. I think it’s worth putting forward. I hope it will make you think. I should clarify the title. Special collections and non-government archives are a luxury as far as the general public is concerned. When archives seek to advocate for increased funding from the government, such as for money for grants programs, they are asking for money to support a luxury. This will sound like heresy, I think, coming from an archivist. I first started thinking about this driving home from the airport after the SAA meeting in San Francisco. What would make a difference, then? We would do better, I think, to acknowledge that archives and special collections are a luxury. Are libraries a luxury? In these troubled times, funding for archives will not be a top priority. So, there, Frank, that’s my answer. Be Sociable, Share! Hiding Magna Carta on the Web. The BL have made a digitised copy of the Magna Carta available on the Web: Magna Carta is one of the most celebrated documents in history.
Examine the British Library's copy close-up, translate it into English, hear what our curator says about it, and explore a timeline. So says the introductory blurb. Well... if it's so "celebrated" and important can someone please explain why the digitised version has been hidden behind a Shockwave viewer that makes it pretty much impossible to do anything other than browse it on the BL's Web site?
Yes, there is a simple version, which does not require a browser plugin, but the copyright statement and complete lack of CC licence (or anything remotely like it) makes it clear that re-use wasn't high on the BL's agenda. Shame on them. Come on BL, you can spend our money better then this! More Access is Better. One of my RLG colleagues today brought us a question from an institution that was considering their options for what to do with a large mass of digitized content they were planning to create.
The question was basically this: would they be better off just making it accessible themselves and letting the search engines guide people there, or join up with a large aggregation such as the World Digital Library? This is certainly a good question, and one worth considering carefully, since it is a foundational question that has numerous ramifications down the road. But all things being equal (and they aren’t necessarily so stay tuned for more on this), more access is better. That is, I would neither put all of my eggs in a “local only” basket nor in a “one big aggregation” basket, but both if at all possible. So as I alluded to above, all things are often not equal, and here are some of the differentiating factors. Related posts: Of Pirates, Treasure Chests and Keys: Improving Access to Digiti. Dan Cohen posted yesterday about what he calls The Pirate Problem.
Basically the Pirate Problem can be summed up as “there are ways of acting and thinking that we can’t understand or anticipate.” Why is that a ‘Pirate Problem’? Because a pirate pub opened near his home and rather than folding shortly thereafter due to lack of interest from the ‘very serious professionals’ who populate DC suburbs – the pub was a rousing success due to the pirate aficionados who came out of the woodwork to sing sea shanties and drink grog. This surprising turn of events highlighted for him the fact that there are many ways of acting and thinking (some people even know all the words to sea shanties without needing sheet music).
Dan recently delivered the keynote speech at a workshop at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Much of the stress of Dan’s article is on fear of new techniques of analysis. And of course – we still need the context. Dan ties his post together by pointing out that: