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(Re)locating and (Re)defining the Archive through Post-Custodial Praxis(2017)

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co-designing technology with Indigenous Australians

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Can digital technologies play a role in " closing the gap " in the 21st century?

Our research is focused on designing digital technologies that operate outside existing power structures. That means Indigenous leaders taking charge of the process - and consulting Indigenous end-users throughout.

Read more: Aboriginal communities embrace technology, but they have unique cyber safety challenges

Indigenous Australians were the first scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians in Australia.

For over 60,000 years their approach to innovation has shaped and informed how modern Australia addresses agriculture and climate change, the natural environment and the mining of minerals and resources.

For the last 248 years, Indigenous Australians have experienced disruption and disadvantage as a result of colonisation. Now with the advent of the internet, the same structures that keep Indigenous people marginalised and isolated in the real world are being translated to the digital world.

In 2015, a gaming app called "Survival Island 3" was made available in the Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore and Google Play Store. The 3D game encouraged players to bludgeon Aboriginal Australians to death. The app was eventually removed from stores, but the fact that it was ever allowed in the first place highlights how online spaces can be hostile to Indigenous Australians.

Digital land rights

Since 2016, we have been building a smartphone app called #thismymob to explore how digital technologies can contribute to improving the health and wellbeing of Indigenous Australians.

This is the first national Indigenous-led research to co-design and build technology with Indigenous people in Australia - if not the world.

We wanted to create a safe and culturally appropriate space in the virtual world, where Indigenous people have a sense of "citizenship". A space where they can connect with their mob - and other mobs - without feeling alienated or vulnerable.

We call this "digital land rights".

Digital land rights can empower Indigenous Australians to express themselves and promote themselves - culturally and artistically - in a positive light, and thrive. It can also mean being able to engage with non-Indigenous individuals and communities on their own terms.

'Postcolonial computing'

Our work draws on American researcher Lilly Irani's framework of "postcolonial computing", which recognises that:

Colonial relationships may have dissolved, and yet the history of global dynamics of power, wealth, economic strength, and political influence shape contemporary cultural encounters.

In order to avoid replicating these dynamics, we use a participatory design approach to create digital technologies with, and for, Indigenous Australians.

A core principle of participatory design is acknowledging that it's the people we design for who know best about what's important to them. So we involve end-users in the design process.

Another important principle is showing respect for people's expertise and their right to represent their own activities to others - rather than having others speak for them. Participatory design ensures that the technology we design is culturally appropriate, and usable in a wide variety of communities and contexts.

Read more: How Indigenous knowledge advances modern science and technology

Our research agenda is driven by Indigenous Australians - in partnership with non-Indigenous Australians - because we recognise that having Indigenous leadership on research and development projects is fundamentally important.

What participatory design looks like

To build the #thismymob app, we conducted design workshops with four Indigenous communities representing very different regions of Australia: Lombadina (WA), Tiwi Islands (NT), Portland (VIC) and Sydney (NSW).

#thismymob Research Team, Author provided (No reuse)

Over 40 participants across these sites helped to design the features and functions of the app. They told us:

what they wanted in their own app

how they would use it

what they consider user-friendly and culturally appropriate, and

how we could help ensure cultural safety and identity.

Some of the features that came out of these workshops include mob identities, mob news, and mens' and womens' business spaces.

The functionality of the app for each user is determined by the mob they are connected to, and their gender. Users can either post directly to their mob, or post to all mobs.

This has meant we had to design and code for many different Indigenous identities, language groups, clans and cultures. In effect: coding for culture.

Who's your mob?

The #thismymob app is about Indigenous community and how we connect with each other. The first thing we usually ask each other in the street is, "who's your mob"? The rest flows from there.

The #thismymob app will connect Indigenous people through a safe and culturally appropriate platform. It will be a place where it's okay to say: "Hey, I'm black and I'm proud."

#thismymob Research Team, Author provided (No reuse)

It will give young Indigenous users the opportunity to reach out to Elders from around the country to ask for guidance and support. It will encourage young Indigenous Australians to take up degrees and careers in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine). It is where Indigenous artists will be able to promote their work to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous buyers.

We hope the #thismymob app will create a sense of ownership in the virtual world and where we can say safely that, "We got digital land rights, hey!"

Looking to the future

The #thismymob project is not just about creating a useful new technology. It will also help shape and inform how emerging technologies are co-designed and built with Indigenous users in the future.

Read more: It's taken thousands of years, but Western science is finally catching up to Traditional Knowledge

We have been consulting with Apple and Google to help refine ethical guidelines for their designers and engineers to ensure that cultural values, ethics, and multiple identities and worldviews are incorporated into their products in the future.

And because we are discussing our ideas with Indigenous groups in other countries, we hope the impact of this work will be felt beyond the borders of Australia.

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'Digital land rights': co-designing technologies with Indigenous Australians

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Can digital technologies play a role in " closing the gap " in the 21st century? Our research is focused on designing digital technologies that operate outside existing power structures. That means Indigenous leaders taking charge of the process - and consulting Indigenous end-users throughout.

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The 'Great Australian Science' 50 years on

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The 'Great Australian Science' 50 years on

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It's 50 years since the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave the 1968 Boyer Lectures - a watershed moment for Australian history. Stanner argued that Australia's sense of its past, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting, which couldn't "be explained by absent-mindedness":

It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.

His lectures profoundly influenced historians partly because of the image he captured: for a practice based on documentation, archiving and storytelling, silence is a compelling idea. And a whole-scale silence - a "cult of forgetfulness", no less - indicated a bold re-imagining of a national historiography on Stanner's part.

As Stanner insisted, this sort of silence was no "absent-mindedness": the occlusion of Aboriginal people from Australian history wasn't inevitable.

In the wake of his lectures, influential Australian historians conceived of their own historical awakening in these same terms. In an autobiographical essay, historian Marilyn Lake described the prevailing historical view in her small rural town: "Growing up in the former colony of Tasmania we did our fair share of forgetting too." And in his evocative memoir, Why Weren't We Told?, Henry Reynolds famously pondered that shift away from silence as people endeavoured to write in Indigenous perspectives from the 1970s onwards.

It's a common refrain. I remember my dad describing how he also "hadn't been told" about Australia's Aboriginal history when Reynolds's book came out. And a colleague and friend recently recounted visiting Myall Creek as part of a Sunday school picnic in the 1980s: no-one mentioned its dark history as the site of an infamous Aboriginal massacre in 1838.

Yet the move from "great Australian silence" to historical "truth-telling" isn't quite as clear-cut as Stanner's description might suggest. "Too often it is taken to imply a kind of historiographical periodisation where there was no Aboriginal history before Stanner's own lecture and an end to the silence after it," writes Ann Curthoys. Yet that doesn't capture the whole picture: "there is neither complete silence before 1968, nor was it completely ended afterwards".

While we now have important interventions into Aboriginal history that amplify Australia's uncomfortable past, such as Lyndall Ryan's massacre map and the Uluru Statement from the Heart, those reverberations continue to cause anxiety.

The Statement from the Heart called for a "truth-telling about our history" but still awaits bipartisan support. Meanwhile, online commentary in response to the release of Ryan's massacre database shows the persistence of historical refusal in Australia.

'Black crows'

The "great Australian silence" is also historically a little more complex. I'm writing a history of history-making in Australia and have been struck by the detailed interest in Aboriginal life as well as the often graphic accounts of frontier violence in works from the early and mid-19th century. For want of colonial history "texts", I've also been reading travelogues and emigrant's guides. While these books and pamphlets are largely observational, they also frequently present historical narratives and interpretation.

Many of them didn't hold back in their tales from the colonial frontier, cataloguing extensive episodes of violent conflict between Aboriginal people and colonialists.

Have a look at this description of the 1838 Myall Creek massacre from Godfrey Charles Mundy in his travelogue, Our Australian Antipodes, published in 1852:

... they captured the whole of them, with the exception of a child or two; and having bound them together with thongs, fired into the mass until the entire tribe, 27 in number, were killed or mortally wounded. The white savages then chopped in pieces their victims, and threw them, some yet living, on a large fire; a detachment of the stockmen remaining for several days on the spot to complete the destruction of the bodies.

It is graphic historical writing.

The horror of Mundy's Myall Creek account is paradoxically eclipsed by the chilling official silence he observes after most attacks:

Reprisals [against Aboriginal people] are undertaken on a large scale - a scale that either never reaches the ears of the Government, which is bound to protect alike the white and the black subject; or, if it reaches them at all, finds them conveniently deaf.

James Demark's Adventures in Australia Fifty Years Ago, from 1893, similarly reports a structural and deliberate deafness in response to the violent, eerie echoes across the frontier: "The settlers retaliated in their own way", he writes, and "there were no Government regulations to check these irregular proceedings".

Even self-described histories, such as those by James Bonwick and John West, explicitly link frontier violence with Australia's colonisation. West's History of Tasmania, first published in 1852, even uses the terms "black hunts" and "black war" to describe the first 50 years of Van Diemen's Land. West was an abolitionist, and a tone of historical injustice inflects his writing about the Tasmanian Aborigines in volume 2.

Take this excerpt, where he relates the perverse logic of colonial expansion:

It was better that the blacks should die, than that they should stain the settler's heath with the blood of his children.

And this one, where he mourns the destruction of Tasmanian Aboriginal society in only two generations:

At length the secret comes out: the tribe which welcomed the first settler with shouts and dancing, or at worst looked on with indifference, has ceased to live.

Bonwick's 1870 history of Tasmania is similarly full of sentiment. In a tone curiously analogous to Paul Keating's Redfern Park speech 120 years later, Bonwick offers this lament on the effects of colonisation on Tasmania's Aboriginal people:

We came upon them as evil genii, and blasted them with the breath of our presence. We broke up their home circles. We arrested their laughing corrobory. We turned their song into weeping, and their mirth to sadness.

Bonwick also reveals the ease with which colonial discourse accounted for murder. During his time in Tasmania, Bonwick writes, he had heard several people explain that "they thought no more of shooting a Black than bringing down a bird". He went on: "Indeed, in those distant times, it was common enough to hear men talk of the number of black crows they had destroyed."

Those recollections of euphemistic colonial vernacular hint at some of Bonwick's method as a historian. In the introduction to his history and in an 1895 talk to the Royal Colonial Institute in London, he gives a more detailed explanation of that approach.

It was not a hunt through blue books [government records], that provided the source material for his research, he explains. Rather, it was conversation and hearsay, from sly-grog sellers, ex-bushrangers and colonial gentry alike, that furnish his historical narrative.

How else could you write about hunting crows?

Alongside those histories was a humanitarian public discourse that anguished over frontier violence. Media commentary, public debates and lectures, as well as letters to the editor from the frontier that related specific episodes of violence, are explored in detail by Henry Reynolds in This Whispering in Our Hearts.

Likewise, poetry such as The Aboriginal Mother (1838) by Eliza Hamilton Dunlop reveals a form of popular and creative history-making in response to colonisation that can be seen in the work of writers such as Judith Wright and Eleanor Dark a century later.

So why was that reverberation replaced with euphemism and omission? Partly the silence was a fear of punishment, as Bain Attwood argues in a recent essay on historical denial.

Especially after the successful prosecution of the Myall Creek massacre perpetrators, colonial front lines and allegiances became a little murkier. "There were good reasons to be silent," historian Tom Griffiths has similarly insisted.

Mundy's 1852 account of his "ramble" through the Antipodes confirms Attwood's and Griffiths' explanation, and reveals how stories quietly murmured along the frontier provided a catalogue of violence. He writes:

Dreadful tales of cold-blooded carnage have found their way into print, or are whispered about in the provinces. And although there be Crown land commissioners, police magistrates, and settlers of mark, who deny, qualify, or ignore these wholesale massacres of the black population, there can be no real doubt their extirpation from the land is rapidly going on.

'Historia nullius'

It wasn't simply a case of an uncomfortable frontier that came to characterise the silence Stanner identified in his Boyer Lectures, however.

The historians Stanner named in his lectures (such as M. Barnard Eldershaw, Hartley Grattan, Max Crawford and Brian Fitzpatrick) were largely silent on Aboriginal policy and history in their mid-20th-century histories - despite being written after the 1930s, a decade that Stanner notes for its influence in shapeshifting on Aboriginal policy.

Yet this form of history writing had begun in the late 19th century. At a time when Australian nationhood and national identity were being formed around Federation, the historical discipline was moving into a particular form of narrative writing oriented towards (non-Indigenous) Australian exceptionalism based on democratic and economic progress.

As Australia's national consciousness emerged, it required a historical consciousness of its own origin. Education departments commissioned history texts and universities appointed history professors. As history became increasingly professionalised, "blue books" and official archives were in; hearsay and poetry out.

So what did disciplinary "silence" look like in Australia? It saw History (with a capital "H") arriving with colonisation: "She alone of all the continents has no history," proclaimed journalist Flora Shaw in a presentation about Australia to the Royal Colonial Institute in London in 1894.

She offers the introductory chapter of a new history and bases her claim to the attention of the world upon the future which she is shaping for herself.

Lorenzo Veracini has described that settler-colonial vision of the Australian continent as a sort of historia nullius, where "Australian history" only existed thanks to the selective creation and curation by colonial historians.

For Australian historians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the silence of pre- and post-contact Indigenous experience occurred because it existed outside the Whiggish historical narrative of imperial progress. "The federation of (white) Australia and the birth of 'national' historical consciousness thus represent ... a moment of disciplinary origin," historian Leigh Boucher asserts.

In his 1916 Short History of Australia, Ernest Scott described "vast tracts of fertile country which had never rung under the hoof of a horse and where the bleat of a sheep had never been heard". In these texts, silence is counterposed against the ringing of axes and "industry".

Scott writes that Australia "begins with a blank space on the map, and ends with the record of a new name on the map, that of Anzac". It's worth dissecting this quote here, to unpack that form of history writing: the inevitability of historical progress and national formation is telling.

We shouldn't assume that this early national history writing was completely silent on Indigenous matters: Coghlan and Ewing's 1902 Progress of Australasia in the Nineteenth Century described the "invasion" of parts of southern Australia by the colonists, and related in some detail the colonial massacre of Aboriginal people at Risden Cove in Tasmania; and Scott's 1916 short history included ghastly and violent accounts of murder on the colonial frontier, as well as the deliberate planting of arsenic in flour destined for Aboriginal people.

Nevertheless, Stanner gave voice to an emergent idea about silence that understands history as a method that changes over time and place, rather than an objective interpretation of the past. It reminds me of what narrative psychologist Jerome Bruner explains as the "coherence" we "impose" on the past, to "make it into history".

In other words, the 1930s histories that Stanner identified in his Boyer Lectures exist in a historical structure where Indigenous perspectives have been locked out. As Stanner himself articulated,

We have been able for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so.

Still a work-in-progress

Stanner's point raises an important question: if "History" itself is tied to the process of colonisation, can it accommodate perspectives outside its colonial apparatus? Stanner sensed that history would overcome its own silences, but doing so would require major methodological shifts, such as the incorporation of Aboriginal Studies and oral history:

In Aboriginal Australia there is an oral history which is providing these people with a coherent principle of explanation ... It has a directness and a candour which cut like a knife through most of what we say and write.

His predictions played out, and such approaches, applied by Indigenous and non-Indigenous historians such as Hobbles Danyari, Heather Goodall, Peter Read, Paddy Roe and Deborah Bird Rose, overturned Aboriginal historiography in Australia.

The murmurings have since turned into a groundswell: Indigenous histories have become increasingly prominent and Indigenous perspectives are now mandated across school curricula. Conspicuous public and political debates over Australian history are further indication of how this counter narrative has become a significant historical lens.

"I hardly think that what I have called 'the great Australian silence' will survive the research that is now in course," Stanner anticipated. And, to a large degree, he was right - a substantial historical revision has taken place in Australia.

If anything, that change has accelerated since Stanner's death in 1981. Yet in university history departments, Indigenous historians still remain vastly underrepresented.

Indigenous perspectives have increasingly informed, critiqued and revised historical approaches. But Indigenous histories are often relegated to "memoir", "story", "family history", "narratives of place" or "political protest", rather than acknowledged as part of a disciplinary practice.

And with the possible exception of oral history and pre-history/deep time, there is still a marked absence of Indigenous historiography in Australia's historical "canon".

We may have developed new critical approaches and a growing understanding of the genealogy of historical "silence". Yet the meaning and the consequences of that understanding are still a work in progress.

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Friday essay: the 'great Australian silence' 50 years on

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It is 50 years since anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave the Boyer Lectures in which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. How far have we come since?

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Deadly Questions - You ask. Aboriginal Victorians Answer.

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This is your opportunity to learn about Victoria's Aboriginal people - their history, culture, connection to place and hopes for the future. It's anonymous, so don't be shy. What will you ask?

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the role of narrative in understanding the value and impact of digital collections (Punzalan et al, 2015)

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Identifying Meaningful Impacts for Digitized Ethnographic Archives (Punzalan et al, 2017)

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Towards Belonging and Believing (2016) by Jarrett Drake

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A risk arises, inevitably, that in seeking to create new things - governments, institutions, or archives - that the new things will in fact be lightweight versions of the old things or worse yet much more malicious. In other words, people and communities often times will emulate the oppression from which they seek to sever, and rather than construct an institution that is truly transformative will instead construct an institution that adheres to the hegemony, patriarchy, and paternalism laced within the logic of the institution that preceded it.

I love the way Paul Gilroy, the British literature scholar and thinker, puts it during a 2007 speech given on the occasion of the bicentennial commemoration of Britain's abolition of the slave trade. When referring to the need to problematize collective memory around the British slave trade and modern capitalism and imperialism, Gilroy makes reference to William Wilberforce, who, to make a crude comparison to the American context, is the UK's earlier equivalent to Abraham Lincoln, in that Wilberforce is also a white man given too much credit for black freedom. Gilroy states about Wilberforce:

"Now, we don't fix that problem [of memory and abolition] by shunting one great man off the stage and wheeling another one on; or, a great woman in the form of Nanny. We don't it. We have to do some damage to that idea of history."

Gilroy's requirement - that we do damage to oppressive ideas and not simply tinker with them - makes me think of the origins of a now-defunct institution in my current city of Philadelphia: Eastern State Penitentiary. At the time of its opening on October 25, 1829 - almost 187 years ago to the date - Eastern State Penitentiary sought to transform the way the world went about administering prisons. The idea behind Eastern State, which was brought forward in the late 1700s by a prison reform group known as The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, was that prisons should focus less on punishment and more on penitence. This emphasis on penitence birthed a new word: penitentiary.

But although the reformers within the Philadelphia Society thought they were setting down a truly revolutionary path and breaking with the traditions of existing prison systems - such as the one in New York State - their idea of prisoner penitence rested on the notion that to become penitent, prisoners must be isolated during the entirety of their incarceration. At Eastern State, inmates were allowed out of their 8 x 12 x 10 foot cells just one hour per day for exercise. Even then, guards escorted inmates out to their exercise yards with hoods covering the prisoners' faces, which was done to prevent any communication between prisoners, for any communication would breach the process of penitence, which the reformers believed could only happen through complete silence, solitude, and surveillance.

Over the course of the 19th century, Eastern State's new approach to prison reform attracted the envy of hundreds of prisons worldwide, and in the process it accelerated the adoption of a practice that to this very day is one of the most vile and vicious form of prisoner abuse: solitary confinement. A project that started as a separation from the old way of doing prisons actually ended up further entrenching the problems that the old way of doing prisons had caused. To loop back into Paul Gilroy's analysis, Eastern State Penitentiary didn't do enough damage to the idea of incarceration, and by not doing enough damage, Eastern State would wind up doing more damage than what already existed.

This brief account of Eastern State should be instructive to the work of community archives. Reformation of oppressive institutions - be they prisons, police, or archives - only yields more mature manifestations of oppression. Trying to reform, rather than damage, oppressive structures is like washing a wound with salt water. Relief may come momentarily but pain will come certainly. I once heard a talk from a bright young man who had been incarcerated but since his confinement went to college and became involved in prison education. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here:

"I don't believe in prison reform, because I don't believe in prisons. You cannot reform oppression. There was no way to reform slavery. And there can be way to reform prisons."

As I have said elsewhere before, I'm an archives nihilist. I don't, on a fundamental level, believe there is a way to reform the traditional way of doing archives. It is, to me, beyond salvage, as are the lot of its professional organizations. They are fruit of a poisonous, oppressive root, and regardless of the sweet sensation in one bite, demise is inevitable. Call me cynical. Call me pessimistic. Call me realistic. I call myself informed.

But this dismal diagnosis of the traditional archive need not leave us despondent. Instead, we should learn from traditional archives the common characteristics of their oppression and the eclectic elements of their inequality. I think these sites are ripe for study and analysis; much like the push to study whiteness - shoutout Claudia Rankine; black women, leading the way, AGAIN - and masculinity, both of which I feel similarly nihilistic about. In past talks, I've discussed a range of oppressive aspects of traditional archives. I honestly do not have enough time in my day to count the amount of structural racism, classism, and all the other -isms that are baked into the normal operations of traditional, mainstream archives.

Given that it would be impossible within 30 minutes to cover all of them, I want to delineate just three characteristics of traditional archives that I hope community archives will examine, challenge, and avoid. I actually already mentioned them today when discussing the vision of Eastern State Penitentiary. Those three characteristics are silence, solitude, and surveillance. I will breeze through my usage of these terms and highlight how each of them is ill-suited, I believe, to the notion of a community archive.

On silence, archivists typically invoke the term's usage in the context of the absence of certain groups of people and communities from the archival record. My brother Rodney Carter - Canada, stand up - authored one of the most formative pieces of writing on the topic of this type of silence, and that piece is worth your full read after this forum. But that's not the type of silence to which I am referring today. I am describing, instead, the type of silence enforced at Eastern State, the type of silence many of us traditional archivists observe everyday at work. It's the silence and solemnity of the reading room, which we tacitly encourage if not outright require.

Silence is an important exercise of control and power. By preventing or discouraging verbal communication between people, the enforcers of said silence - whether prison guards at Eastern State or monitors of reading rooms - remove our human instincts to connect with other human beings as human beings. How oppressive it is of archivists to expect users to consult documentary records that chronicle the peaks and valleys of humanity - love, hate, war, abuse, joy, humor - and display no auditory or affective response. Traditional archivists are, in that sense, no different than the National Football League in its staunch commitment to eliminate what it deems to be excessive celebration after touchdowns. Both groups, the archivists and the NFL, want thinking, loving, caring human beings to engage their humanity but only so far. I dare say that visits to most reading rooms of traditional archives would show two common features: pictures of old white men, and silence. The patriarchy in these parts is palpable and pleased.

On solitude, common practices of providing access to records in a reading room involve delivery of documents to a single researcher stationed at his - usually, it's his - desk, and during the entirety of his visit, he consults the contents of each box to his heart's content, rarely if ever inviting others to partake in the experience with him. In fact, in some traditional archives, if he dares to break the solitude of the performance by wanting to photograph a document and post it to a blog or a social media account, he must first usually get permission from the archive to do so, or risk censure from the archive or worse.

The impact of this solitude - again, another feature of Eastern State Penitentiary - is very real both for the actual users of the archive and the potential users of the archive. Actual users are impacted because they are discouraged or disallowed from engaging with the archive in a way that makes sense for them and corresponds to how people expect to share content in this millennium; can you imagine seeing a YouTube video that you enjoy and being forbidden from posting it to Twitter or Facebook? Potential users of the archive are impacted because they don't get the chance to see the Tweet, Facebook, or Snapchat video that never got posted due to the archive's archaic affinity for solitude and solemnity.

Lastly, on surveillance, traditional archives swim through surveillance like fish swim through water. I wonder, truly, if our field would be what it is without its reliance and reification of surveillance. A poignant piece on this topic is a 2002 article by Eric Ketelaar entitled " Archival Temples, Archival Prisons," of which I also encourage a full read. But in the nearly fifteen years since the article's publication, we've seen both an intensification of the United States' war on terror and an increase in incarceration rates and the number of people under correctional supervision. Both of these trends depend on surveillance, and that dependence has eroded many facets of quotidian life, such as visiting an archive.

At many of our reading rooms, users of archives are often required to show photo identification, an act for which we have the data proving that ID requirements disparately impact communities of color, the elderly, the poor, and the rural. In addition to the photo ID requirement, users may be subject to additional search or inspection of bags. If users pass this level of screening, the archive furthers the surveillance apparatus by keeping records of the materials that users request and view in the reading room. And finally, while in the reading room, users may be surveilled by multiple staff of the archives and increasingly by closed-circuit camera. Also while in the reading room, users are consulting records that very well may be surveilling and offering intimate details about the people and activities described in the documents.

Surveillance, to many archives, is a narcotic. We are so addicted to the drug of surveillance - again, this was another core pillar of Eastern State Penitentiary - that we can't see the damage it's done to ourselves, to our society, and to our neighbors. The impact of this bad habit is felt by the most disenfranchised and disempowered communities. Arab-American communities. Muslim communities. Latinx communities. Queer communities. Black communities. Indigenous communities. These communities, plus more, are enemies of the white supremacist state - of which our nation is a proud leader - and thus these are the communities most susceptible to the consequences of our dirty habit. We need to get clean, and get clean soon.

I walked you through these three common characteristics of archives to demonstrate that, to a certain extent, the traditional ways that archives do business are in many ways antithetical to the notion of a community, so in many ways the push for the creation of community archives is actually a coup of thinking and doing for many people who identify as archivists. Archives and archivists as we have come to know them don't care about community; they care about components, they care about control, and they care about capital. If community archives are to be the transformative spaces that I believe they have the capacity to be, they must not only resist the temptation to replicate these capitalist concerns but also must establish their own sets of concerns that challenge traditional archival praxis and theory.

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Liberatory Archives: Towards Belonging and Believing (Part 1)

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A risk arises, inevitably, that in seeking to create new things - governments, institutions, or archives - that the new things will in fact be lightweight versions of the old things or worse yet much more malicious.

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Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description

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This talk, which formed part of a panel about archival description, was delivered at the 2016 Radcliffe Workshop on Technology & Archival Processing, held on April 4-5, 2016, in Cambridge, MA. The panel, moderated by Jennifer Weintraub, also featured Anne Wootton and Kari Smith.

With a title like this, I want to start by first explaining my role as digital archivist within the Princeton University Archives. The 'digital' in my title is entirely misleading. For starters, I concern myself not with all digital archives, just those that are born-digital, referring to records created and used on computing devices. This excludes materials digitized for preservation or access, a topic already ably addressed today. The 'digital' in my title also obscures the fact that I still retain responsibilities for paper records. That said, I do not solely describe collections for the Princeton University Archives. I have also had the chance to assist in the appraisal and acquisition of archival records, most recently through the Archiving Student Activism at Princeton (ASAP) initiative. So, my subsequent critique of provenance draws on my understanding and application of the principle in both an analog and digital worlds, from appraisal through access.

My critique of this principle also stems from my shared role in partnering with community activists and archivists to establish A People's Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, an independent, community-based archive that collects stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by citizens in Cleveland, Ohio. My role in the archive has been strikingly similar to my role at Princeton: I've drawn on my technical skills in both positions to preserve and provide access to born-digital archival material, which has included the task of thinking about and doing the archival description of materials in both repositories. However unlike in Princeton, I have no role in appraisal with the police violence archive, as that is the exclusive role of the archive's citizen archivists.

From the intersection of these two experiences, I have come to understand that provenance, which is perhaps the most sacred principle in the archival field and the principle that most shapes archival description in the United States, is at once a relic of the colonial and imperial era in which it emerged and also an insufficient principle to address the technical challenges of born-digital archival records and the social challenges of creating a radically inclusive historical record. The goal of my talk is twofold: 1) to highlight the severe shortcomings of provenance as it pertains to the aforementioned challenges and 2) to advocate for the imagining of a new principle to guide archival thinking generally and archival description specifically.

With that said, the argument I am advancing about the shortcomings of provenance falls within a long line of critiques from archivists and scholars, so my case is not presented from an extant ether, but it grounds itself among the literature from thinkers such as Helen Samuels, Jeannette Bastian, Richard Cox, David Bearman, Heather MacNeil, Terry Cook, Wendy Duff, Verne Harris, Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, Cheryl Beredo, Bertram Lyons, Jefferson Bailey, and Mark Matienzo, just to name a few. But I hope to make a nuanced argument that builds upon the work of these thinkers and, as my colleague Maureen Callahan suggested yesterday, speak to my professional experiences as it relates to this argument. Lastly, I should clarify that I am not, necessarily, calling for an abandonment of provenance, though that may well be an outcome. I am, instead, calling for the emergence of a new principle - one free from colonialist and imperialist ambitions - that faces forward to the future of the archive as a space with the capacity both to preserve and provide access to born-digital records over time and with the consciousness to recognize the inequality, violence, and injustice of modernity and ensure that the communities most directly impacted by them have equal access to archival processes, of which description is just a part.

The principle of provenance, which regrettably gained not one mention yesterday, is the formative foundation of archival records and their description within the Western world. As an idea, the principle asserts that, in order to preserve context, records of different origins, or provenance, must not be mixed with those of other origins. The concept's history, as the Canadian archivists well know, is debatable, but the French archivist Natalis de Wailly gave a new name to the idea in 1841 with his introduction of the term respect des fonds. The ideas of provenance and respect des fonds, which some use interchangeably, spread to American archivists at the beginning of the 20th century as the American archival profession began to separate itself from historians and librarians.

Canadian archivist Shelley Sweeney offers a vivid explanation of provenance as "a railroad train that picks up and discharges passengers at stations as it rumbles along its circumscribed path through the countryside," which implies that provenance is, at times, a blunt, unforgiving, and impatient object that has a predetermined if not precarious path. In any case, at its most basic level, provenance thrives with the presence of a clear creator or ownership of records and with a hierarchical relationship between entities, both of which reflect the bureaucratic and corporate needs of the Western colonial, capitalist, and imperialist regimes in which archivists have most adhered to the principle. This principle, again, is the central organizing unit for description in most archival repositories and archivists must comes to terms with the ways in which we incorporate the privilege, power, and patriarchy of provenance into our everyday practices.

It bears mentioning that provenance emerged as a concept in the West at a time when most people were structurally if not legally excluded from ownership; ownership of their own bodies, minds, labor, property, and records. Its application in archives, which is close to 200 years old, reflects the limitation of state regimes in the West to recognize fully the human rights of indigenous Americans, black people, women, and gender non-conforming people. Provenance's early 20th-century rise in the United States coincides with the rise of anti-black racism and state violence domestically and the increase of imperialism in Latin America, the Pacific, and Asia, the latter of which Cheryl Beredo covers in her excellent work Import of the Archive. As such, the concept that the fonds of one creator should not be mixed with the fonds of another creator is, in theory and in practice, a legacy of colonialism. Moreover, one can imagine the ease of determining a clear creator or owner when just a sliver of Western society had 1) the legal privilege to create and own, and 2) the legal protection of that privilege.

Over the last century, the patriarchal origins of provenance penetrated the language of archival description. Archivists convey provenance information in various parts of a finding aid, which is the final product of archival description. The biographical note is one such part of the finding aid that contains provenance information. In this note, archivists often write massive memorials and monuments to wealthy, white, cisgendered and heterosexual men, including selective details about the creator that have minimal bearing on the records, and instead serve to valorize and venerate white western masculinity. Our collection management tools reflect this patriarchal path: parent components, child components, sibling components, and spawning are but a few examples in the widely adopted software ArchivesSpace. These practices and this language are remnants of a colonized mode of thinking about the world through the gaze of great white men, whose complexities and contradictions previously could only be explored in the archives by similarly complicated and great white men.

I conclude my brief account of provenance not with answers but with questions. To the disenfranchised, marginalized, and colonized, what is the idea of provenance? For one who legally cannot own her body, what does it mean to own records? Why does the archival community revolve around just one 175-year-old principle that emerged in an exclusively analog world at a time when archive-making and empire-building were the exclusive rights of white wealthy Western men? How does a reflection on the contextual origins of provenance as an idea explain who is present, absent, loud, and silent in the archives, and how does the digital deluge accentuate that absence? How might one interpret these silences and absences not as sudden surprises but as predictable products of archival processes and principles rooted in colonialism, anti-black racism, sexism, homophobism, transphobism, and classism? Most importantly, how can archivists revisit this core principle to learn of its limitations and envision a post-colonial archive free of these oppressive forces and equipped to meet the challenges of contemporary born-digital archival records? The wide growth and adoption of digital technologies afford archivists and theorists an opportunity to introduce a new foundational archival principle. It's critical we seize this moment, both for its technical and social possibilities.

From a technical view, progress over the last two decades in information technology problematizes, in theory and in practice, the principle of provenance, as the fonds of one creator are increasingly less distinct from the fonds of other creators. Google Drive, Dropbox, and other commercial collaboration tools complicate conventional ideas of custody and property by enabling and encouraging shared stewardship of files and folders. Who, in a legal or archival sense, owns a shared document or folder that lives on a remote server owned by a third-party service provider? Can two distinct persons or corporate bodies both lay claim to custody, and if so, does that conflict with the principle that the fonds of one creator be separate from the fonds of another? Because of this shared and often complex stewardship, a new foundational archival principle would account for this reality, which will certainly increase with time. Practically, users of born-digital archival records should expect archival description that visualizes, manipulates, or otherwise makes available the structured information about a folder's or document's sharing permissions. From our description, users should be able to obtain at least the following three facts: 1) the person(s) who had access to a particular file or folder, 2) their level of access, and 3) the log of changes to these access permissions. This information, which I argue is critical to capturing the context of born-digital records, resides within the filesystem(s) and thus can be extracted programmatically without human intervention or error, but its inclusion within archival descriptive stretches the limits of our understanding of provenance.

From a social view, this expansion in digital technologies disrupts theoretical and practical applications of provenance for two separate but related reasons. First, we occupy a moment in history in which the largest percentage of the world's population ever possesses the power and potential to author and create documentation about their lived experiences. Emanating from the first, the second disruption is that this increasing agency gives people and communities a chance to name themselves, a process essential to establishing provenance that was previously reserved for the archive and the bureaucratic and corporate entities that rely on it. How can the archivist, for instance, distinguish the fonds of two creators without the authority first to name them? If the state, vis-à-vis the archive and related authority holders, relinquishes control over naming, does the archive become an unsorted mess of ambiguous avatars, a challenge Meredith Evans noted yesterday regarding the Documenting Ferguson repository and a challenge replicated in the police violence archive in Cleveland? Because of these two social disruptions of provenance, a new foundational archival principle would account for this liberation. Practically, users should see names not from an authorized source or agency but names asserted by people, organizations, and communities responsible for the shared creation, stewardship, and custody of records. Users should not, as my Princeton colleague Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez pointed out, see archival description that normalizes the violence archivists can legitimize through processes of naming and unnaming and gendering and degendering, but instead users should expect archival description that reflects the autonomous naming decisions of people and communities, including and especially if they wish to withhold their names. Naming creators in our description according to one's self-assertion is crucial to preserving the context of born-digital archival records, yet it too runs counter to how archivists conceive and practice provenance.

Critics of this call for a new foundational archival principle to guide archival practice and description will note the potential pitfalls about anonymity, lost authority, and how the two might conspire to impale the credibility of collections and the trustworthiness of the archives at large. As seen in the description of records within the Documenting Ferguson and Preserve the Baltimore Uprising repositories, this concern is not unfounded. Yet, journalists regularly report on evidence obtained from confidential sources, especially when that source occupies a vulnerable or precarious position and the revelation of their identity poses a risk to their wellbeing. Why should the evidence in archives be judged by a different standard? What's more, we archivists must resist our colonial inclinations and realize that not all who are named are truthful and not all who are unnamed are deceitful. In repressive regimes, the litmus test for truth-value cannot be one's willingness to go on the record. In fact, the opposite is needed: these regimes require spaces for the unsayable to be said, without fear of retaliation or reprisal.

As stated earlier, this new way of conceiving archives and archival description wouldn't necessarily extinguish the principle of provenance. Destroying one colonial relic to replace it with another gains us nothing. Rather, this new archival principle would be one possible way to do and describe archives. This plea is a call for construction, and if destruction is but one small outcome, so it is. Also, I have neglected to provide any specific principle that I myself would assert for consideration. This is intentional. The truly transformative principle that is needed for archival practice and archival description cannot come from one person or from one invite-only forum, but such a principle necessarily must develop organically, slowly, and anti-oppressively with a radical cross-section of academic, disciplinary, racial, ethnic, gender, cultural and class backgrounds represented. In this sense, a new foundational archival principle, should it be worth anything, must be developed beyond the bounds of the archival profession.

My combined experiences at the Princeton University Archives and with A People's Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland show that the descriptive challenges facing born-digital archival records is not technical or social, but both technical and social. Considering one without the other obscures how humans use information technology, which is to achieve both technical and social ends. In many ways, provenance as a theory or practice is poorly positioned to address either challenge, and so I dare us to think boldly, radically, and creatively about how to do and describe archives differently. Our future, and soon our past, will depend on it.

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RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description

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This talk, which formed part of a panel about archival description, was delivered at the 2016 Radcliffe Workshop on Technology & Archival Processing, held on April 4-5, 2016, in Cambridge, MA. The panel, moderated by Jennifer Weintraub, also featured Anne Wootton and Kari Smith.

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Talk: Crowdsourced transcription of Handwritten Medical Health Records

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Talk: Crowdsourced transcription of Handwritten Medical Health Records

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Unmil Karadkar at #ipres2017 about the first privacy-sensitive transcription software

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Citizen participation helps rescue damaged archival resources

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Many archive centers suffer from budget cuts and must make the difficult choice of selecting certain collections to preserve to the detriment of others. Over the last few years, Wikimedia Canada has been involved in a project to create Wikipedias in Aboriginal languages. It was with this in mind that Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) called on the participation of Montrealers to preserve photographic archives by organizing their first scan-a-thon.

Frédéric Giuliano, coordinator-archivist, transferred four archive fonds, also known as collections in some countries, to BAnQ Vieux-Montréal from three BAnQ centers:

These archives illustrate the lives of the Cree and Algonquins of the Abitibi, the Innu from the Côte-Nord region, and the Atikamekw from the Mauricie region. As these archives are quite old, the negatives have become oxidized; several images were already permanently damaged. As such, they needed to be digitized as soon as possible.

For this activity and the future scan-a-thons, Wikimedia Canada and the WikiClub of Montreal acquired a specialized scanner, the Epson Perfection V850 Pro (recommended by BAnQ archivists), which allowed the scanning of negatives on film in very high resolution. Of course, it was necessary to have an equivalent digitizer if not better than that used by the digitization department of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

After a short training of an archival specialist, the volunteers took turns to place the negatives in the film holders, while others digitized them.

Quality assurance

At the same time, other volunteers ensured that there was no dust, that the images are complete, and other quality control. Then teams of volunteers, on each side of the consultation room (photo), received the photos on USB sticks, uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons and in some cases described the images, as not all have original descriptions. Other participants translated the descriptions into several languages, and if a Wikipedia article can be illustrated by one of these images, participants will improve the article.

Thus at the end of the day, more than 500 images and documents, dating from as far back as the 1700s, were digitized and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The archives will directly benefit from this as well-through the free license on Commons, BAnQ can take and use those previously undigitized photos and descriptions in their own catalog.

Once the fonds were uploaded in Commons, volunteers from around the world digitally restored some of the photos by removing wrinkles, dust, and tears. Digital photo restoration is something of a speciality for some Wikimedians, with perhaps the most notable case coming with an image of the Wounded Knee massacre. The image, uploaded by the Library of Congress, was restored by a Wikimedia editor who found that seemingly random background detritus was actually four different bodies from the massacred Sioux tribe.

And then?

This experiment was a conclusive success, with both participants and BAnQ delighted with the results. Wikimedia Canada and BAnQ are already planning more scan-a-thons!

All of the scanned and uploaded images can be found on Wikimedia Commons.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this project. Preserving our memory is a priority.

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Wiki Loves Archives: Citizen participation helps rescue damaged archival resources

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Many archive centers suffer from budget cuts and must make the difficult choice of selecting certain collections to preserve to the detriment of others. Over the last few years, Wikimedia Canada has been involved in a project to create Wikipedias in Aboriginal languages.

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In 1989 David Bearman threw virtual bombs at the practices of the archival profession. In Australia we responded to the emerging issues of digital recordkeeping influenced by Bearman's challenging analysis. However access has long been an area somewhat neglected within the Australian recordkeeping profession. Access indeed was not a part of the AS4390 set of standards which in many ways encapsulated our professional response to digital recordkeeping in the 1990s and attempts to incorporate public access[1] within international recordkeeping standards have failed to gain professional traction.[2] Those professionals specialising in 'reference and access,' addressing the 'cultural goals', have long felt isolated and ignored by the development of records continuum thinking.[3] Another way of framing the discussion is to suggest that the concept of public access itself needs to be considered well beyond the walls of the archival institution, and that the artificial splitting of concerns about public access according to age (and custodial thinking) does not serve us well professionally. Addressing this is core to reconceptualising the access function for the future in the digital environment. Public access is not necessarily the same as access to government information, nor does it simply equate to archival access. Increasingly private organisations are embracing open data initiatives to enable public access and legislation is requiring some access to organisational and indeed, personal, data. Every individual is a key stakeholder in access to records, potentially if not always in practice - not simply the 'users we prefer', already trained and skilled in using our descriptive methods to enable retrieval. Our access frameworks are fragmented into multiple pieces of legislation further complicated by incompatibility across jurisdictional boundaries - while recordkeeping is increasingly location-less.

How then do we reconceptualise the function of providing public access and reconnect all aspects of public access in the digital environment? The challenges raised by the 'Reinventing Archival Methods' workshop included:

Emphasising the human dimension of archives, acknowledging the place of emotion in archives

Conceptually reconnecting the public access framework

Exploring boundaries: digitisation equals access; access equals appraisal

Defining infrastructure to address these issues - how well do our records/archives systems meet these requirements?

Emphasising the human dimension of archives, acknowledging the place of emotion in archives
Managing records as passive objects or end products is missing an opportunity to connect. Records may be an outcome of a process, but records have also been a mechanism to objectify decision making - to remove the decision making from the consequences of that decision making. Increasingly we know that records reflect decisions that profoundly affect people, people's lives and their rights and obligations. While this mantra about rights and obligations has always been in the archival vocabulary, recordkeeping professionals have inevitably reflected the organisational view of records - linked to processes which are described in organisational terms which may or may not be the same as those of the subject of the record - depersonalised perhaps to the 'data subject'.

Records are imbued with people. They are the creators, the processors and often the subject of records. They are the retrievers, users and re-users of records. The acceptance of agents as one of the core metadata entities for recordkeeping underlies this acceptance within our professional practice and is one of the core conceptual building blocks of the elegant Australian Series System.

Many archives have their basis in the shaping of identity that consciously reflects the society or organisational reality that the creators of that archive wished to convey. This is true no less for government archives than of community and organisational archives. Indeed the trend to community archives and the celebration of identity through conscious representation in the archives, or by construction of alternative archives, is a feature of contemporary archival discourse.[4]

The emotional effects of records on the people or relatives of people in the records has never been clearer than in the impact of access to records relating to children removed from family, most particularly evident in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report,[5] exhibitions and proactive archival involvement. The development of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, published in 1995 by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA)[6] provides a great model for engagement with particular communities. The provision of counselling services and trusted advisors to persons affected by disturbing revelations in records also emerged at this time. The spate of enquiries, commissions and initiatives to acknowledge damage and assist children removed from family through migration, forced adoption, or children in institutional care has culminated in Australia with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.[7] Here issues of access to records run up against all organisational barriers, and it is somewhat disturbing not to find recordkeeping professionals always front and centre in contextualising, explaining and assisting interpretation of records relevant to the affected community and organisations. Indeed anecdotal tales of poor and insensitive presentation of records to individuals from this community can be shaming to hear. While, when alerted to the potential impact, archivists clearly step up to the mark to provide access appropriately, does this sensitivity to impact operate across the recordkeeping spectrum? What can be done to recognise the emotional impact of people's lives in records? When does abstract interest supercede provision of sensitive access? Is it age of the record? Is it the circumstances of the research? Is it the relationship of the person to the case? What impact does the 'channel' of the delivery have - should protocols more generally be developed to enable sensitive information to be delivered more appropriately? Who determines what is sensitive? Can this be unified across sites of access - the Web, in the creating organisation or in the archival reading room?

If people are central to records, what can we do to enable and privilege this? And how appropriate is this? Personal information has never been more important to individuals, yet privacy and personal data protection is often considered to be antithetical to archival concerns. Do we understand the dimensions of privacy protection appropriately? Knee jerk reactions which cause oppositional stances between the protections of personal information and the recordkeeping profession are inappropriate. To what extent can metadata management, the flagging of records containing personal information, the permissions accorded by individuals to records - following the crowd-sourced appraisal model of the census returns[8] - be incorporated into our practice to enforce individuals' wishes for managing their personal information better?

Once we have information about people in our records, is it ours? Are there limits to what is appropriate use? The interesting case of the mooted 'Right to Forget' Directive in Europe raises the ire of French archivists concerned for the continuation of recordkeeping as we have known it,[9] but also provides a great opportunity to embrace a different model of constructing recordkeeping, more interactive, one more respectful to the wishes of the person about whom information is being created/captured.

What happens when information retrieval and semantic technologies - digitisation, text extraction, topic modelling, linked open data, image classification etc - remove the veil of privacy through obscurity that has traditionally protected much of the private information in paper records? The potential of creating much more deeply interlinked archival and recordkeeping systems provides exciting pathways for exploring and understanding archives. But when the data relates to you, me, or people who are actively participants in our records, are the rules different? Public access to Commonwealth data in Australia is now typically available at 20 years after the transaction - but that is data potentially about each one of us. Should this be available for searching, classifying, mashing, merging and linking? By commercial or government entities, or just by private citizens? Should we be redefining our access regimes and rules not on age at all, but on personal versus other information? Can these new technologies help by allowing much finer-grained access controls? What are the limits of personal information - is it the details of the people in the event logs (the recordkeeping process metadata) as well as the people involved in the substance of the transactions. The public concern expressed for privacy in the proposed retention of data from ISP and telephone companies in the recent inquiry into National Security legislation[10] is about just this capacity to mine relationships, make connections and construct stories. The cry that it's just metadata was a welcome addition of the word to the public sphere, but scary in that it revealed a significant technical naivety among our legislators.

Users of archives want access to personal information, evidenced in the success of the new providers of aggregated access to archives - the genealogy technology companies such as Ancestry.com. We should be far more engaged and understanding of the possibilities and management of personal information. Traditional appraisal thinking has steered us away from considering case records or transactional records as the matter of archives. Yet it is just these records that are now within our technological competence to manage but we have no clear professional or socially acceptable articulation of our role in managing such personal information.

New ways of engaging with records, with public access across time and sites of access provision, the users and the people in records, are needed to reinvent our access practices now and into the future. Opportunities are presented to us, but we need to engage actively with multiple communities to work through alternatives. For example are we simply managing access to our archival holdings or are we responsible for implementing a more engaged access model suited to all environments.
Conceptually reconnecting the public access framework
Our access frameworks are fragmented almost beyond the capacity to recapture a cohesive framework for public access. This reflects the significant change from the situation where access was a privilege accorded under archives and public records legislation to the present situation where access, at least to personal information, is a right.

The UNESCO Declaration on Archives states 'Open access to archives enriches our knowledge of human society, promotes democracy, protects citizens' rights and enhances the quality of life.'[11] The open data movement, most evident in access to public sector information initiatives, advocates the future in data: 'Data allows us to adapt and improve public services and businesses and enhance our whole way of life, bringing economic growth, wide-ranging social benefits and improvements in how government works.'[12] The wave of reform of freedom of information or right to information legislation with its emphasis on proactive disclosure, following in the wake of the UK initial impetus in this area, puts the focus onto accountability and transparency of government information. While seemingly restricted to government institutions the trend to openness and reuse of data is also to be seen in the vendor-driven push for endless data retention under the rubric of big data and data mining into commercial organisations.

But all this is happening in fundamentally disconnected ways. As specific problems arise, new legislation is rushed forward to plug the gap. The access framework even for public institutions is actually contained in at least 4 different sets of legislation, and because this is largely a state-based function, no consistency is apparent across jurisdictional boundaries. Worse, access to records living outside the archival organisation is subject to management from many disciplines essentially grappling for ascendancy - and the recordkeeping profession largely fails to be at the table, with a multitude of other information disciplines filling the gap.

So what are the opportunities for knitting the framework back together again? A conceptual picture of the landscape for both public and private organisations would be the first useful step. Identifying the many opportunities for connecting with information wherever it resides - not just within the walls of the institutional archives - is essential. This involves coming to grips with the reality of the distributed network of information that is the current technology environment we inhabit.

We need a coherent professional view about what the role of access is - what is the relationship of the archive(s) with the information technology reality we have in the slippery, ever-changing technological omnipresence in which we operate. With the 'release' of public information all over the Web, through legal means (such as proactive disclosure, open data publishing) or alternative means (such as leaking, exposures in WikiLeaks style journalism) what then is the role of archives - is it really restricted to considerations only to those things living inside the custodial walls of the institution? What role do or should archives have in relation to organisations such as the Internet Archive, or the concept of the Web itself as the archives, and Google as the gateway to all archives. This is the early technology realisation of Derrida's 'all is archive' - what is our professional response?

We need to fight the fragmentation of access that is occurring within organisations too. The understandable emphasis on information security using standards such as ISO 27000 management standards are further pushing considerations of system security onto the contents of these systems - but clearly being seen from a specific technological point of view. This is indicative of the fragmentation of access and security within organisations in which the emerging push to information governance (not data governance, not system governance) offers an opportunity for recordkeeping professionals to seize an active participation role - if we can skill up to take it. And the construction of access within accepted regimes from the time of the records creation in a coherent fashion makes application with retroactive access a much less onerous task.

A focussing of the conceptual understandings of, and responsibilities for, access will quickly reveal that public access, for government information at least, is not happening in only the reading room or via the archives email or web interface. It is happening across organisations. We need to:

connect with the information disclosure or publication requirements under various freedom of information (FOI) regimes,

incorporate published data into the archival interfaces (if not physically managing the information, providing the contextual layer at least),

explore the capacity to link existing contextual information in archival systems for open data sets.

For example, rather than every individual department independently publishing lists of material opened under FOI like legislation, why could these not be considered differently? Instead of publishing a single lengthy list to meet the requirements of the law, why not a list linked specifically to the functions and activities represented on the organisational web page? Alternatively the list could be deposited with a central government data store, linked to the open data sets, and accompanied by the contextual information from archival control systems to promote their availability wherever required. The example of NSW State Records Digital Archives providing the NSW 'Publications' portal linked to their contextual descriptive system provides a great proto-model for practical applications leading to a potential reconceptualising of the recordkeeping and archives role.
Exploring boundaries: digitisation equals access; access equals appraisal Digitisation equals access
Within the workplace, potentially in the public mind, most obviously present in the work of digital humanities scholars at present, and rather disturbingly within archives institutions themselves, the simplification that digitisation equals access is often sloppily to the fore. This needs to be broken apart and considered in detail. At the base of this is the transformation of format - from analogue to digital. Badly constructed digitisation projects are simply that - format transformation. Connected to well-thought-out processes, of course this format transformation allows connection to digital systems. Quite radically different dissemination mechanisms do transform access - enabling multiple simultaneous users, not dependent on a physical location, with endless replicability at high quality.

'Clever photocopying' is one aspect. Converting to formats capable of digital manipulation is another. The assumption that the digital is now the record is disturbing. Actually the record remains the thing on which the business action was done. Different rules then apply depending on which format is the record, and which is the copy. The proliferation of digitisation standards in all jurisdictions indicate that these concepts need articulation and that, generally speaking, the difference is not clearly understood.

The focus on digitisation as a dissemination technology is a great thing. But have we really understood the compromises we are making by adopting the third party commercial arrangements that are commonly used by archival institutions? Are we, in effect outsourcing our archives? The business model of compromising free access in return for the costs of digitisation must be a good thing in order to achieve the transformation of past paper records into digital surrogates. But the models and mechanisms in commercial exploitation should be subject to greater clarity and investigation to ensure that we are not fatally compromising the validity of the archives institution. Ancestry.com has become the archive for genealogists - and it has done a superb job, enabling access to multi-national resources through one interface. But is there an equivalence to our library colleagues who are increasingly finding the trade-offs with publishers' digital subscription models unpalatable? We've our own set of imposed conditions - such as only being able to provide free public access for a specific period bound to a physical location such as the reading room. What will happen in the 10-year restricted period? In this dynamic technical environment, is this too long to tie up resources? In what form will the material currently in the commercially-restricted systems be available for free public access through the archives? - you can bet that it won't have the clever multiply-linked enhanced searching that is provided by the commercial providers. Are we trading more than just our records when we enter into these deals? What of the intangible goods such as the volunteer labour being harnessed by sites like Ancestry.com to transcribe, annotate, and index our digitised archives? Will this user-generated content be shared back with archives along with the digital images? And, if not, will volunteers be willing to duplicate that effort when the exclusivity period expires?

Is the archives a physical location and repository as a defence against the encroaching non-physicality of the Internet? Is it the physical thing, the repository of holdings rather than the provider of access? Can these roles be usefully separated? Are we setting ourselves up to fail, as we construct bespoke digital preservation programs focussing on small scale, hand crafted, usually format based preservation techniques?

And what of the assumption that this is digital recordkeeping? It kind of is, because once digital, the images and the metadata constructed to surround them, do need to be managed as digital resources, but really this is not the same as managing the tsunami of born digital that are being created - but not transferred to archives - in creating agencies. And there are so many problems with continuing to conceptualise access to archives as being only accessible through the prism of archival systems within the custodial walls. Many of the elements of the archival systems - the contextual, functional, structural provenance links essential to interpreting that information over time - are needed in organisations currently struggling to manage digital records. And are we managing digital records? The work of Frank Upward and colleagues is commencing a reconceptualisation of recordkeeping as a component of appropriate management of any digital information. Recordkeeping informatics is a liberating conceptualisation, again allowing a dynamic space for professional interaction in workplaces beyond the narrow conceptualisation of EDRM systems.
Access equals appraisal
This equation invites exploration of the linkage between access and appraisal. The two professional practices should not be seen as completely independent. The pairing invites consideration of the reality that records are only created if they are required for some form of future access. If records don't exist, they cannot be accessed. If records cannot be accessed, they might as well not exist. Access here does not mean that records are created for the purposes of archival access and particularly not access once past the custodial threshold. Access embraces use in doing business, in supporting decision making, in providing evidence now and into the future. In making the equation work, the conceptualisation of appraisal must be located firmly in the Australian articulation of appraisal as a continuous, analytic process focussed on business context. Appraisal in these terms results in a continuing assessment of records requirements providing the basis for recordkeeping rules, including documenting context, defining what records should be created and the appropriate rules to continuously manage records in relation to risk, access, migration and disposal.

As argued in the accompanying 'Appraisal' paper, setting up records that will last for the time that they are needed, is a core recordkeeping endeavour requiring focus on metadata structures to capture the appropriate descriptive and contextual elements for their interpretation. But appraisal, particularly in the digital environment, is a continuous process, and the demands of technology-dependent digital records require constant attention to this nexus of appraisal and access.
Defining infrastructure to address these issues - how well do our records and archives systems meet these requirements?
The role of the records and archives system comes under scrutiny whenever the adequacy of digital recordkeeping is discussed. Using the conceptual models inherent in our home-grown Australian Series System, records are surrounded by always expanding amounts of metadata in multiple systems, reaching out to audiences from those within the organisation to those in the public sphere, increasingly concurrently. The series system is conceptually based upon the idea of inheritance. We have lost this notion of linkage, inheritance and ever-growing metadata in the practicalities of our paper-derived transfer protocols requiring box lists, manifests or transmission lists. Records cross custodial thresholds as discrete objects, often without the rich metadata that surrounds their creation and management in creating systems.

Can we reclaim this idea of inheriting rich metadata, and what would happen if we could? Conceptually the building blocks are in place. Could we use archival contextual systems to link back to the front ends of agencies records on the Web? What creative uses of the contextual metadata can be found/made?

Our rich conceptual metadata models are based on the notion of relationships - relationships both within records themselves in aggregating into multiple strings of transaction, and between core entities of people, business and records. Our practice in implementing these relationships has been lacking. Lacking in precision of definition of relationships - we are still largely working with paper-based articulation of relationships, including the ubiquitous 'otherwise related' relationship clump. Relationships should prove a fertile ground for research and exploration. They potentially provide exploration of records transversely, vertically, and horizontally. Exposing and utilising relationships opens up new ways of exploiting records and it is highly compatible with the types of relationship linking on the web, yet within our own professional systems it is undervalued and under-exploited. To build upon relationships these need to be separately identified and described, and then inherited by all subsequent systems managing the records. What opportunities exist in the world of the semantic web, and in linked open data? The series system, and our multi-entity recordkeeping metadata standards with their relationship statements already providing the central structuring feature, seem like an immediate fit with the expression of Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples. Isn't this a machine representation format made for the series system? If this can be done using Encoded Archival Description (EAD) in the UK, surely we can do it here.

This discussion presupposes that our descriptive systems are appropriate. Are they? This question is raised, appropriately, whenever public access is discussed. Archives and records systems are primarily devised on principles suited to our recordkeeping profession.[13] We insist upon the centrality of provenance and context entities such as agents and mandates. The often heard debate from newcomers to archives, particularly those from other information disciplines, is that this emphasis is inappropriate. Even Daniel Caron, late of Library and Archives Canada, has suggested that 'perhaps it would be easier, wiser and more logical simply to recognise and admit that provenance is an out-dated analogue concept which does not translate well to the digital infosphere of the computing cloud'.[14] Users, except those steeped through training and use of archives in our control systems, by and large hate our systems. Most recently, Zoe D'Arcy described observing users interact with Records Search at the National Archives of Australia being like 'watching a train wreck'.[15] Yet die-hard archivists refuse to give up the notion of provenance and relationships. Why? What are the fundamental reasons for this and why is it so difficult to assert this without always having to re-argue the case with professionals from different backgrounds.

One issue may well be that the early forms of automation of our records and archives systems essentially automated paper systems and the paper systems fundamentally served the professionals not the people who used them. So is one interpretation that we need to quite radically reconceptualise the user front end? And what would this look like?

The work of Dr Tim Sherratt[16] and Dr Mitchell Whitelaw[17] in providing different ways of engaging with collections is instructive. Visualisations as front ends? Why not? Why not enable relationships, already present in our systems, to be represented as pathways for user exploration? Our archival systems are loved by those involved in data hacks where the availability of such rich, complex and interesting public data is a treasure trove for experimentation - sometimes even linked to digital images. But are we really enabling ourselves to take advantage of such initiatives? The resulting apps are experiments, fragile and unsustainable in isolation. How can archival institutions harness the imaginative power of such work? And while we may be thrilled with such work, we should never forget that this is primarily about access to the metadata in the systems, and building multiple front ends is only possible because of the rich metadata in those systems. How can we use the exemplars to reconceive front end interfaces for the public? Can we reconceptualise access paths to all digital records within our jurisdictional scope using the same techniques?
Conclusion
What is clear is that we need to re-cohere the view about what the professional role in public access is, to respond to the complexity of current access regimes and to relocate access considerations within recordkeeping.

Addressing the demand for greater responsiveness from what we have in the past thought of as the 'subject' of the records means we must develop new ways of engaging with records, beyond the institutional walls and the custodial framework. We need better protocols for handling personal information, from the point of records creation to administering the rights of access in a context removed from the original transaction. Our metadata concept of agent should explicitly include both sides of transactions to embrace the subject's rights, not only those of the organisation. Inevitably, this cannot wait until the records 'age' sufficiently for public access in the decent obscurity of an archival searchroom.

The profession should seize the opportunity afforded by the push to information governance as a means to regain our seat at the table and help organisations deal with the complexity of public access regulation and demands. We can offer a more interactive model of recordkeeping, responsive to the interests of all parties and realising the full potential of the rich metadata contemporary records systems typically accrue but which is so often discarded in custodial arrangements with the archives. The new technologies and the current demand for utilising government data offer us examples and opportunities for doing access differently, whether it is crowd-sourced additions to public data sources or providing links and rich contextual information to enhance discovery and comprehension, such as the NSW State Records Digital Archives is providing in its NSW 'Publications' portal.

Some of this may be new, such as centring access within the appraisal framework and re-conceptualising recordkeeping as a necessary component of managing any and all digital information. Much of it is not. Every archival institution with microfilm has had to address the challenges associated with re-formatting records for the provision of access. What it requires above all is seeing the environment of change in technologies and demands as opportunities to be grasped, not a call to arms to defend the archival citadel.
Endnotes
[1] Note: this discussion has been limited to public access, rather than the intricacies of internal access within organisations, which have largely been professionally articulated in international standards such as ISO 15489.

[2] An attempt at getting international agreement, via the ISO records community, was made in 2003-04, but this was not successful and was subsequently abandoned.

[3] Paul MacPherson, 'Public access to post-current government records', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 30, no 1.

[4] For further exploration, see a number of recent issues of Archival Science, particularly the Special Issue on Memory Identity and the Archival Paradigm, Vol 13, Issues 2-3, June 2013

[6] Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, 1995, available at <http://aiatsis.gov.au/atsilirn/protocols.php>, accessed 14 February 2014.

[7] Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, available at <http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/>, accessed 14 February 2014.

[8] Michael Piggott, 'Appraisal 'firsts' in twenty-first century Australia' in Michael Piggott, Archives and Societal Provenance. Australian essays, Chandos Publishing, 2012

[9] Eric Pfanner, 'Archivists in France Fight Privacy Initiative', New York Times, 16 June 2013, available at <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/technology/archivists-in-france-push-against-privacy-movement.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0>, accessed 14 February 2014.

[10] Commonwealth of Australia, Report of the Inquiry into Potential Reforms of Australia's National Security Legislation, June 2013, available at <http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=pjcis/nsl2012/report.htm>, accessed 14 February 2014.

[11] UNESCO, Universal Declaration on Archives, available at <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002134/213423e.pdf>, accessed 14 February 2014.

[12] Nicolas Shakespeare, An independent review of public sector information, May 2013, available at <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/198752/13-744-shakespeare-review-of-public-sector-information.pdf>, accessed 14 February 2014.

[13] Cassie Findlay, 'People, Records and Power. What archives can learn from WikiLeaks' Archives and Manuscripts, Vol 41, No 1, 2013

[14] Daniel Caron 'Reflections on the Evolution of Appraisal at Library and Archives Canada. From Content to Context to Content Through Context, speaking notes for Daniel J. Caron, National Archives of the Netherlands', 2012, available at <http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/news/speeches/Pages/reflections-evolution-appraisal-lac.aspx>, accessed 14 February 2014.

[15] Zoe D'Arcy, tweet from Digital Treasures Symposium, Canberra, 21 June 2013.

[16] Dr Tim Sherratt, see http://discontents.com.au/, accessed 14 February 2014.

[17] Dr Mitchell Whitelaw, see http://mtchl.net, accessed 14 February 2014.

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Barbara Reed In 1989 David Bearman threw virtual bombs at the practices of the archival profession. In Australia we responded to the emerging issues of digital recordkeeping influenced by Bearman's challenging analysis. However access has long been an area somewhat neglected within the Australian recordkeeping profession.

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Introduction
In 1986 David Bearman first put the argument that core archival methods of appraisal, description, preservation and access were fundamentally unable to cope with the volumes of records archivists were required to process. He called on the archival profession to completely reinvent its core methods. [1]

Noting similar challenges in evolving digital business environments led the Sydney based discussion group, the Recordkeeping Roundtable (in partnership with the Australian Society of Archivists) to hold a two day workshop in Sydney in November 2012. This 'Reinventing Archival Methods' workshop was attended by nearly 70 participants from across Australian and New Zealand and included students, educators and professional records managers and archivists working in a range of government and private sector environments. [2] At the workshop participants debated and explored means by which archivists can fundamentally reassess their professional methods and determine mechanisms for the creation and maintenance of stable archival records in the twenty-first century.

To continue the discussion generated at the event and in order to extend this discussion to a broader audience, at the conclusion of the workshop it was decided that members of the Recordkeeping Roundtable would lead the development of two issues papers addressing two of the key discussion topics at the workshop, the professional archival methods of access and appraisal. While the Roundtable workshop did not consciously separate the two, the methods of appraisal and access have traditionally been conceptualised separately. The 'Reinventing appraisal' and 'Reinventing access' issues papers that appear in this issue of Archives and Manuscripts have bowed to this separation but inevitably each paper touches on both access and appraisal issues.

Both papers also share a similar structure, based on core questions that resonated through the Reinventing Archival Methods workshop. These questions ask:

do the professional methods of archivists allow them to respond to the human dimension of archives?

can a shared conceptual understanding of core archival methods be achieved?

how well do archival methods deal with contemporary business realities?

how well do archival methods meet current archival requirements?

This paper explores these questions as they relate to appraisal.
Do their professional methods allow archivists to respond to the human dimension of archives?
Before an extensive discussion of archival methods and professional practice, it is important to define appraisal. The first national standard on records management, AS 4390-1996: Records Management (the development of which was also inspired by the work of David Bearman) acknowledged appraisal as the core of the recordkeeping endeavour. It defined appraisal as:

the process of evaluating business activities to determine which records need to be created and captured and how long the records need to be kept, to meet business needs, the requirements of organisational accountability and community expectations. [3]

AS 4390 codified appraisal as a proactive recordkeeping process, about record creation as much as about record disposal, requiring the assessment of business and community requirements for information at or before record creation and using these requirements to ensure the creation and maintenance of necessary records. In the AS 4390 framework, appraisal begins with questions: What is the purpose of making and keeping records? Why do people want them? What will they do with them? What will they do without them? Who else besides the formal creators needs the records and why?

At the Reinventing Archival Methods workshop, the complexities of these questions were rigorously discussed. Speakers Sue McKemmish and Tim Sherratt argued that emotion and an acknowledgement of the human dimension of archives had been lost from much professional practice. They emphasised that records are primarily about people and therefore the archival profession needs to acknowledge the human dimension of archives and to allow its professional methods to encompass this. [4] It was argued that highlighting the human dimension and the place of emotion in archives points appraisal towards the broader, contested and complex areas it needs to address.

In the workshop, many observed that that memory in the form of records is frequently contested. This is because interactions between individuals and the state are not equal, and neither are the interactions between most individuals and corporations, religious institutions or other organisations such as sporting bodies or unions. Inevitably the records of interactions between an individual and an organisation will be created by the organisation itself and its 'official record' will form the basis of the institutional memory. Consciously or unconsciously, the actual voice of the individual will be silenced. The role of reliable, authentic, authoritative records in fixing institutional memory is widely accepted as a truism of the archival profession, yet hidden below this is a personal, emotional, human reality that could be denied or unrecognized within official institutional recordkeeping.

Acknowledging the human dimension of archives has long been an issue for many archival institutions. A specific and widespread example is the appraisal of case files in a variety of administrative settings. In traditional paper format, their large volumes dictated a standard approach which identified the policies and procedures governing the processing of cases as the long-term records while individual case files were retained for only a limited number of years after the case was closed. If allowing for professional methods to respond to the human dimension of archives, would archivists appraise these activities the same way today, in the context of rights of access and privacy, in the context of the ongoing struggle by Aboriginal people to contest official history, or with awareness of the centrality of case file records in aiding separated families to be reunited or to at least understand their story? Today appraisal needs the capacity to respond to these complex and often competing personal and bureaucratic realities.

In contemporary Australia, arguably today the most publicly contested political issue is the response to the mass movement of peoples as refugees. Administratively, this response is controlled across a range of federal government agencies but core aspects have been outsourced to multi-national organisations. It is impacted by state and federal law as well as international protocols such as UN conventions and international laws of the sea. It involves a wide variety of non government organisations, as well as state and federal police, local hospitals, public and private medical staff, local governments, local businesses, local communities and religious organisations. The diverse incompatible, national and multi-national, highly secure and/or commercial-in-confidence, politically contentious, fragmented, corporate, potentially cloud-based environments in which information about refugees is created and managed, as well as multiple personal, local and informal environments, overwhelmingly compounds these problems. Few areas of official administration of law and government services are more complicated, but at the centre are people whose fates are tossed around in this maelstrom, whose stories are presently hidden from view but whose individuality will be preserved in multiple forms of records. Will their professional methods allow archivists to identify the human dimension of these archives? If appraisal frameworks can make an adequate response to this administrative complexity while identifying and respecting the human dimension of archives, then the reinvention of archival methods will be well underway.
Can a shared conceptual understanding of core archival methods be achieved?
Before such a reinvention is possible, however, there needs to be consensus around what is being undertaken. Sadly today it would appear that what was once a shared conceptual understanding, the definition of appraisal as codified in AS 4390, has substantially fallen away in the years since the standard's inception. [5] Today appraisal is taking on different meanings, many of which are conceptually quite different from AS 4390's intentions. As the reach of that shared understanding has shrunk, fragmenting recordkeeping operations are increasingly starting to dominate across business and archival environments.

Appraisal today more often refers to the time archivists spend assessing existing records for their potential to be retained as the corpus of documentary cultural heritage, than to assessing business activities to identify recordkeeping requirements for creation, management and accountability into the future. The focus in archival institutions on older records which are more often paper than digital, has lost sight of the AS 4390 concept of appraisal and reduced much of contemporary practice to authorising destruction. As discussed below, this is far removed from the digital realities and necessities of the contemporary workplace. The experience of determining the "value" of existing records, reviewing inherited accumulations of records, or deciding on the retention or destruction of individual record items which may be ten or more years old, is poor preparation for appraising activities and developing records requirements in the current business environment. While it is highly likely that the assessment of retention periods and identification of records of activities requiring long term retention are correct, applying those judgments to the fragmented information frameworks of most contemporary organisations is increasingly impractical, if not actually distorted when the focus is still often a small residue of legacy paper records.

A shared concept of appraisal will help archivists to respond systematically to the complexity of current recordkeeping environments in ways which also embrace and support complex access frameworks, but redefining this shared understanding is not yet understood as a professional priority. In 2008 Steve Bailey noted that 'It is the fitness for purpose of our existing appraisal methodologies for the Web 2.0 world that have been examined...and, to varying degrees been found wanting'. [6] In the years since Bailey's observations, the professional and societal need for a renewed concept of appraisal has become even more urgent.
How well do archival methods deal with contemporary business realities?
In contemporary organisations, the following challenges exist, all of which specifically impact on appraisal and the ability today to create and manage meaningful business information:

multiple professional responsibilities

technological complications

information devolution and decentralised business processes

commercialisation and proprietary systems

evolving forms of record

data volumes and the risks of data storage.

Multiple professional responsibilities
Today the challenges of influencing record creation, as required by the AS 4390 understanding of appraisal, are significant. Professionally many archivists struggle to 'get a seat at the grown ups' table' [7] to advocate for improved governance and accountability in business projects or IT systems. They have difficulties convincing others of the significance or costs of inadequate recordkeeping for both a project's completion and for subsequent business operations. In the digital environment recordkeeping needs to be a collaborative endeavour, a partnership between recordkeepers and business and ICT staff. In practice however recordkeepers are seldom identified as stakeholders and project phases where they should most critically be involved, such as assessments of business processes and definition of information requirements, are often limited as a cost-cutting measure. Appraisal is therefore scoped out of many contemporary business initiatives and few recordkeeping professionals are positioned to argue successfully for its inclusion.

Instead today there are many professionals assuming control over what has traditionally been the responsibility of records managers and archivists. In most areas the ICT industry has broadly assumed control over areas which previously have been either management or recordkeeping responsibilities, including business specifications and information requirements definition. When information requirements are considered from ICT perspectives, however, they tend to be defined as technological issues and not as matters of governance, business risk or asset management and so core recordkeeping requirements are not considered.

The widespread use of third party service providers for technology and service provision, or to perform business operations on an organisation's behalf complicates these issues further. The outsourcing of business processes and the relinquishing of the technical capacity to design and retain records which are then also held in external systems, further limits the reach of appraisal and potentially jeopardises access to business records over time. The lack of recordkeepers' profile in contemporary organisations also results in outsourcing or provisioning decisions being made without adequate planning, risk assessment or appropriate recordkeeping safeguards inserted into contractual arrangements.

As an example, information management is rarely considered as a business risk or issue requiring management in cloud-based service arrangements. The costs or limits to data portability in many cloud environments, or the routine deployment of standard data purge conditions in these services can significantly impact on appraisal objectives and business information needs, but these risks are seldom factored into management's decision making processes. In social media environments, business activity occurring here is seldom referred to records and information management staff for assessment and as a consequence, the proactive recordkeeping actions required to manage high value corporate information in this space are rarely initiated and necessary appraisal actions do not occur.
Technological complications
Because appraisal is not generally performed during system design and implementation, the result is often the creation of inadequate records, or records which cannot be adequately managed within a system, or records which cannot easily be exported from systems. Post factum appraisal in these circumstances is then also constrained by the costs and difficulties of migrating records and their metadata from legacy systems. These difficulties are such that increasingly, legacy systems are being abandoned as the cost of migrating or maintaining them cannot be justified by continuing business use, even before the costs of ongoing licensing are included.

Appraisal is not being used to mitigate other system-related threats to business and business information. Contemporary business tools such as wikis, network environments, mobile apps or collaboration tools are commonly adopted under team or project-defined rules and are therefore not aligned to broader information governance frameworks. Many of these business-defined tools are routinely purged or deleted at the conclusion of a project because project staff (who may also be contractors of a third party provider) are unaware of any ongoing use requirements for the information they contain.
Information devolution and decentralised business processes
In the digital environment records are also devolving and decentralising and appraisal methodologies are not keeping pace with these information evolutions. For example, many transactions that were once managed by forms, templates and through a central corporate file might now performed via personal email accounts, section-based business systems and network environments, campaign-specific social media accounts and web front ends to large corporate databases. In most organisations there is little accepted central regulation of all business information, so most users are free to use their own descriptive terms, management approaches and native application environments for data storage. Consequently there are no easy means to link all components of a transaction, nor to define through appraisal which if any of these components has long-term business value.

The broad adoption of 'bring your own device' (BYOD) strategies in business is also escalating the fragmentation of corporate information and is leading to the radical diversification of recordkeeping environments. Corporate information is increasingly held in personal applications on personal devices and appraisal is making few if any inroads to safeguard or manage this business information.

Appraisal should be a tool to reconnect and manage fragmenting records of business operations. It should be the means of continuously assessing and analysing business process and context and not a static, retrospectively focussed process divorced from business realities. Archivists need to develop a different approach to appraisal to provide the means of identifying business and technical evolutions and keeping the evidence needed for business activities through these evolutions, without trying to impose unwelcome centralisation on an organisation, but professional practice has not yet achieved this objective.
Commercialisation and proprietary systems
Appraisal objectives are further limited because today the majority of commonly used business applications are commercial products. The commercial drivers behind these applications cause frequent product change and innovation which in turn drives frequent data migration and re-configuration. Some commercial products are also designed to limit interoperability with other vendors' products. These factors drive up the costs of retention of data over series of regular scheduled software upgrades.

Elena Danielson has warned against this 'the commodification of information', and argues that it is a potential disaster for the identification and maintenance of long term value digital records. She argues that the commercial incentives behind today's lack of standardisation and the increasing opportunities for information to be 'owned' can, potentially, irreparably damage the ability of organisations to access their own business information over time. Appraisal needs to be deployed as a risk management or abatement strategy in response to both the fragmentation and the complexity of the business system environment to ensure the ongoing accessibility of core information, but this is not a standard approach.
Evolving forms of record
Appraisal today is also not keeping pace with evolving forms of records. Today's business systems generate extensive metadata but in the absence of conscious and continuing appraisal, there is little attempt to determine what metadata needs to be kept, for example, to maintain the meaning and value of records, to authenticate transactions, to initiate processes, to contextualise data, to identify and validate information, to connect business transactions across multiple systems, to enable data reuse and the deployment of 'big data' strategies, nor to leverage the ongoing utility of metadata itself as an aggregating resource over time. Systems and their management frameworks also constitute records of how organisations perform their operations and appraisal therefore needs to embrace assessment of both metadata and systems in its scope, but this perspective is still broadly missing in commonly applied professional practice.
Data volumes and risks of data storage
In addition to all that identified above, appraisal should also be the expert strategy to address and manage the current data growth rates and risks but professionally, archivists are struggling to apply appraisal strategies in digital business environments. The risks associated with this lack of professional action are becoming extreme. To illustrate, David Rosenthal of Stanford University, in response to current trends to 'keep everything', has analysed the costs of storing all today's data in the cloud. Rosenthal concludes that 'keeping 2011's data would consume 14% of 2011's gross world product. Given the International Data Corporation's estimates that annually, data is averaging a 57% volume increase, Rosenthal calculates that 'endowing 2018's data will consume more than the entire GWP (Gross World Product) for the year'. He summarises by saying, 'We are going to have to throw stuff away'. By prevaricating and not confronting the problem and allowing digital data volumes to grow, Rosenthal concludes, 'We may be in the bad situation of being unable to afford either to keep or to throw away the data we generate'.

The accumulations of data which constitute personal information, now regulated by privacy legislation in most jurisdictions, pose significant risks to the organisations holding them if they fail to protect them from unauthorised access or accidental loss. Organisations like Telstra, Target, Sony and banking corporations have been embarrassed by breaches of large quantities of personal information which ought to have been better secured or destroyed when no longer required. [10]

Archivists must leverage these risks and opportunities and demonstrate how the risks inherent in poorly managed data accumulations can be mitigated by appraisal based on regulatory requirements and the actual business needs of the processes generating the data. However for all the reasons outlined above, archivists are poorly equipped to confront these issues and demonstrate their value to business.

These then are existing and emerging challenges across all current business environments where today's records are being created, but many legacy issues associated with traditional practice further compound these problems.
How well do archival methods meet current archival requirements?
Within business environments, then, archivists are poorly positioned to deal with the appraisal-related challenges they face but within their own institutions, archivists themselves have constructed many of the barriers now impacting their practice.

To examine why archival methods are not enabling archivists to meet their own professional requirements, this section asks:

How is appraisal defined and understood in archival institutions?

How has current recordkeeping become separated from archival institutions' priorities?

Are archives engaging with a business understanding of records and recordkeeping?

What should be done with the backlog of legacy records?

Is digitisation a strategic response to the management of records of continuing value?
How is appraisal defined and understood in archival institutions?
As stated above, much of the appraisal practice occurring in archives today does not actively engage with digital business realities. Appraisal policies in many archival institutions still define appraisal as a process to preserve a documentary cultural heritage rather than identifying appraisal as laying the basis for practical and accountable recordkeeping, now and into the future. This institutional practice perpetuates the view that appraisal is a post-hoc process, divorced from current business environments, and fails to respond to the recordkeeping difficulties outlined above. And regardless of institutional orientation, whether toward efficient recordkeeping or the preservation of cultural heritage, archival authorities have suffered significant budget and strategic cuts in every jurisdiction, limiting the effectiveness of any strategy they seek to apply.
How has current recordkeeping become separated from archival institutions' priorities?
While most archival institutions wrestled with their paper backlog and the demand for online access to archival holdings, their engagement with current recordkeeping focused on standard-setting and supervision and approval of major disposal authorities. In organisations, the focus of records managers was the implementation of new electronic document and records management systems (EDRMS) in response to the proliferation of email and the decentralisation of business operations. The development of other business applications beyond the EDRMS's reach was in the hands of ICT sections with the ear of top management and the budgets to give them authority. The gap between the reach of the EDRMS and other core applications and the difficulties of implementing disposal authorities (in spite of the investment of corporate time and energy in them) did not enhance the standing of records managers, nor the authority of the archival institutions.

At the same time archival institutions encountered competition from other institutions or commercial entities in providing access to historical information. The effect was to concentrate their inwards focus on existing holdings and digitisation as the means of improving access for users. The response of many institutions to the impact of budget cuts was to emphasise the cultural heritage aspect of archives at the expense of intervention in current recordkeeping. The by-product of this re-orientation of archival institutions was the downgrading of engagement with issues and developments in contemporary business environments, leaving archivists professionally unprepared to deal with all the contemporary business-related challenges outlined above.
Are archives engaging with a business understanding of records and recordkeeping?
Recordkeeping, such as it is in contemporary organisations, is de-centralised and poorly understood in relation to the priorities of business. In many organisations, the term 'records' itself is understood to mean paper, not any form of digital content. Recordkeeping is understood as an administrative and compliance-based process, not as a mechanism for providing business value, nor as a process to support strategic or risk based objectives.

Senior staff and chief executives are broadly unaware of the risks their organisations are facing through decentralised and irregular recordkeeping. There is also no sense of the long term in most organisations. Systems, budgets, executive teams, projects and business strategies tend to operate only for 3-5 year periods before ceasing or changing fundamentally. The need for access to information beyond these timeframes is not widely understood and in many organisations backup tapes are regarded as a principal mechanism for meeting business risks or meeting longer term information access needs.

Archival institutions need urgently to develop strong relationships with the executive management of these various business environments to respond to these challenges, but strategic relationships of this type are not widely developed or fostered and poor understandings of recordkeeping are instead generally allowed to proliferate.
What should be done with the backlog of legacy records?
In the majority of organisations there are extensive backlogs of paper records. These often lack adequate control and description and have not been assessed against appraisal criteria to determine whether they can be destroyed or if they require continuing retention. Annually the volume of these legacy records cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in in-house accommodation or commercial storage arrangements. These tangible costs mean that dealing with backlogs has dominated appraisal processes and obscured a failure to engage with contemporary recordkeeping issues.

Paper legacies however will soon be dwarfed by poorly managed digital legacy data and systems. These urgently need a risk-managed, proactive appraisal approach to identify and retain core information and allow the remaining data to be destroyed. These approaches then should also be applied to the paper legacy volumes, but such strategic approaches are rare. Before long, however, with decreasing budgets and increasing data volumes, archival institutions will be held to account for what will be perceived to be their bureaucratic approach to legacy information management. Archival institutions urgently need a legacy management strategy. This will likely be a compromise approach from the perspective of traditional archival requirements, but it is critical in terms of obtaining more strategic outcomes.
Is digitisation a strategic response to the management of records of continuing value?
Archival institutions today operate under difficult financial circumstances. Paper holdings are degrading and require extensive preservation operations, while digital archiving operations are non-existent or poorly funded.

In a previous era microfilming was seen as the answer to the increasing costs of storage of paper. Today digitisation is seen as the answer to both the costs of storage and also to improving access to archives for the public. But archivists must be circumspect in their response to this apparent answer to their problems. The strategic difficulties of deciding what should be digitised reproduces the dilemmas of the past but is compounded by the popularity of online access. Archival institutions cannot ignore this broad audience in favour of the preservation of what they or significant users regard as the most important records. Digitisation is cost-effective as far as storage is concerned but requires laborious preparation and even more careful metadata management than paper-based records. Determining what records to prioritise for digitisation is, in itself, an appraisal decision but the matter of selecting records for digitisation seems to have become detached from the appraisal which first identified the records for continuing retention.

Returning to the example raised at the beginning of this paper, appraisal of the multi-jurisdictional, multi-layered activity of responding to asylum seekers, what should archivists do to ensure the voices of the other side of government and organisational activity are included in archival consideration and are preserved beyond standard custodial arrangements? Archivists need to explore the way all stakeholders in such contested fields of action can be included and can exercise control over their own part in the story. Adopting a risk management approach to appraisal of business activities should mean not avoiding accountability but should address the matter of protecting the rights of all parties. If an activity like dealing with asylum seekers is seen only through the eyes of the principal government agency and in terms of a custodial response, then an impossibly distorted view will be preserved. With appraisal in these complex environments, archivists must think beyond the four walls of the government institutions and consider crowd-sourcing as one possible alternative strategy. Appraisal cannot stop with the identification of the records of continuing value. But it is clear from the difficulties under which archival institutions currently labour that the cost and means of sustaining access is part of the exercise. And on this issue, are archivists perhaps asking the wrong questions? Should they be thinking about providing access to records in different ways? Custody and control are not the only answers to the preservation of archives. Other records which have long-term use, such as registers of births, deaths and marriages, passport registers, electoral rolls or land use records dealing with water management or toxic waste have never been in archival custody. What can archivists learn from such examples about how to reinvent and reinvigorate their practice, engaging with others and thinking very broadly and strategically about possible pathways forward?
Defining solutions
This paper has explored some of the complexities under which appraisal currently labours and identified specific issues of concern. This section proposes some possible pathways that could be further explored in order to reinvent appraisal and protect and effectively manage contemporary information.
Recognise and immediately engage with archives of emotion and community concern
Possible solutions for appraisal start with community engagement. What long term functions with critical community requirements are moving to high risk environments? Engagement with key organisations, such as those providing community services, support for Aboriginal communities, or children in detention looms large because of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. No area links the twin recordkeeping issues of appraisal and access management so completely. But there are other equally contested areas of activity where communities are at odds with government or organisations, and have long term interests in adequate recordkeeping to call corporations to account, such as management of coal and coal seam gas extraction, urban planning, environmental protection, protection of water supplies and responses to identified dangers of climate change. Research projects within these areas could provide immediate and focussed action areas and specific priorities for the reinvention of archival methods.
Do not retreat to the past
This paper suggests recovering original Australian concepts of appraisal to provide a systematic approach to the complexities of current recordkeeping practices and access regimes. While this is a start, it is doubtful that resurrecting the 1990s framework is enough. Many developments in the past two decades require expansion of this framework and a new demonstration of the utility of appraisal as a tool of analysis, risk management and compliance applied repeatedly, if not continuously, over multiple environments which require recordkeeping actions.

In re-examining AS 4390's original concepts, it becomes clear that the concept of stakeholders or community interests explicit in the AS 4390 definition of appraisal was in practice far too limited. Attempts in the 1990s to develop a methodology for a documentation strategy implicitly recognised these limits and sought to look to a broader appraisal context than one institution, or one region, or to consciously and explicitly expand the concept of stakeholders. This deserves revisiting as an enriched means of documenting context and engaging communities outside the normal reach of archival institutions. Looking for collaborative ways to appraise complex issues or activities, which embrace non-institutional views and non-custodial means of managing preservation and access, would escape the single institutional view dominant in current practice and would again provide lessons that could broadly be applied to reinvent archival methods.
Re-engage business
Archival institutions are increasingly recognising the need to engage with enterprise ICT strategies and with corporate enterprise governance issues. Building upon this engagement, archival institutions and records staff across organisations need to work demonstrate the utility of systematic appraisal to contemporary business. The complexity of current compliance regimes provides one opportunity to show how systematic appraisal of business activities can help. Archivists could also demonstrate how appraisal can help overcome the problems of fragmented business and recordkeeping environments with an effective information creation and management strategy. In these endeavours, appraisal should be undertaken to identify the recordkeeping requirements for organisations' activities without implying control by archival institutions. Whether appraisal is used as a risk management strategy or to demonstrate organisational compliance with the regulatory regime, it is undertaken first and foremost for business purposes, not as a grab for the 'important' records.

Once the complex, contemporary regime for managing access to information and records is taken into account, the need to build personal information management and means of managing access rights over time into appraisal is obvious. The growing prominence of public concerns about privacy offers another opportunity to bring recordkeepers/archivists to the table.

In addition to the defensive utility of managing risk and compliance, the positive aspects of appraisal can be shown in realising the value of large accumulations of data. The value of these accumulations of data will be enhanced if appropriate recordkeeping to control, authenticate and manage them is built into their design, not bolted on after the event. Whether the data is accumulated from transactions with clients or from research or developed iteratively over time, adequate identification and authentication of the data and the management of rights (access and intellectual property) from the outset increases its usefulness to organisations and its sustainability. Appraisal as part of the business analysis and design enables management of data growth and timely and compliant disposal and archival institutions and others need to work to develop effective ways of communicating these messages.

Sadly business analysis and management of current recordkeeping has been separated from the daily practice of most archivists in archival institutions. The struggle to establish a robust, digital archival practice is both a consequence and reinforcement of the division of labour which has occurred over the past two decades. The focus on implementation of elaborate EDRMS in organisations and the pre-occupation of archival institutions with their own issues cut recordkeepers out of the picture just as major developments in computerised business applications took off. The question now is how do archivists re-enter the field to respond to the problems and demonstrate that recordkeeping based on systematic appraisal will help solve many of them. Individuals in organisations of course will continue to build their relationships and seize opportunities as they present themselves, but the onus is on the archival institutions with the legislative mandate to act. A strategy is needed to set priorities and to re-engage with contemporary business operations to overcome the invisibility of recordkeeping. While there are competing priorities including the issue of the very survival of independent archival institutions, if adequate recordkeeping is not implemented in contemporary organisations, the future of those archival institutions will be reduced to keeping paper relics. In this sense re-ordering of priorities and strategies is needed as much as review of archival methods.
Appendix
Here are some initial directions which we consider could focus discussion about recovering an appraisal framework in ways that address the complexities of current business activity and contemporary recordkeeping:

Providing and implementing an exemplary recordkeeping strategy in contemporary organisations

Fostering an understanding of recordkeeping's advantages and responsibilities in organisations

Determining and marketing a risk-based documentation strategy for functions or jurisdictions to set priorities in areas of highest community and business's needs.

Building support for recordkeeping by design in business and system environments.

Determining a risk based policy on legacy data to allow its appropriate retention or destruction.

There are however many, many others.

Solutions to all these issues need to be fast and they need to be radical to attract attention and responses, and it's up to us to develop them. To make a start, we need to prioritise based on areas of high risk, we need to engage, we need to collaborate and we need to do it now.
Endnotes
[1] David Bearman, Archival Methods, Archives and Museum Informatics Technical Report Number 9 (Pittsburgh,Archives and Museum Informatics, 1989) http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/archival_methods/

[2] A report of the workshop is available on the Recordkeeping Roundtable website at https://rkroundtable.org/2012/12/14/reinventing-archival-methods-report-whats-next/

[3] AS/NZS 4390: Records management, Standards Australia, Homebush, 1996

[4] See Tim Sherratt, Archives of Emotion at http://discontents.com.au/archives-of-emotion/ and the summary of Professor Sue McKemmish's presentation at https://rkroundtable.org/2012/12/14/reinventing-archival-methods-report-whats-next/

[5] Unfortunately identifying and managing access requirements as a core function of recordkeeping did not receive the same attention in this and other codification exercises. Today this lack of serious access-specific analysis has left archivists ill-prepared for the complexities of the current regulatory regime and for negotiating the over-lap and contradictions of archival, freedom of information and privacy protection legislation in the era of rights to personal information protection, large-scale digitisation and revelations of mass surveillance.

[6] Steve Bailey, Managing the Crowd: rethinking records management for the web 2.0 world, Facet Publishing, London, 2008

[7] Cheryl McKinnon, 'Not Sitting at the Grown-ups Table: The Problem with Records Management', http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/not-sitting-at-the-grownups-table-the-problem-with-records-management-013264.php (published 27 October 2011)

Elena Danielson, The Ethical Archivist, Society of American Archivists, 2010, p.160

David Rosenthal, 'Let's just keep everything in the cloud' http://blog.dshr.org/2012/05/lets-just-keep-everything-forever-in.html (published 14 May 2012)

[10] See examples in the data visualisations at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/world-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/

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Kate Cumming and Anne Picot Introduction In 1986 David Bearman first put the argument that core archival methods of appraisal, description, preservation and access were fundamentally unable to cope with the volumes of records archivists were required to process. He called on the archival profession to completely reinvent its core methods.

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Blogpost: Reinventing archival methods (2014)

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Blogpost: Reinventing archival methods (2014)

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Includes Reinventing appraisal and Reinventing Access

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A collection of articles and short contributions from The Recordkeeping Roundtable, our friends and colleagues, on the theme of archival reinvention.

Introduction by Kate Cumming, Cassie Findlay, Anne Picot and Barbara Reed
Articles
Dr Kate Cumming and Anne Picot ' Reinventing appraisal '

Barbara Reed ' Reinventing access '
Short contributions
Xiaomi An, Hepu Deng, Bin Zhang ' Reinventing the Concept of the State Archival Fond in China '

Luke Bacon, ' A Sea of Kites: Pushing access to archives with progressive enhancement '

Belinda Battley, Elizabeth Daniels and Gregory Rolan, ' Archives as multifaceted narratives: Linking the "touchstones" of community memory '

Nicole Convery, ' From reactive to proactive appraisal '

Mark Crookston, ' Reinventing Archival Methods: Am I part of the problem or part of the solution? '

Adrian Cunningham, ' Eternity Revisited: In pursuit of a national documentation strategy and a national archival system '

Dr Katrina Dean, ' Digitizing the modern archive '

Dr Joanne Evans, ' Reflections on the Promise and Pitfalls in Reinventing Recordkeeping Metadata '

Cassie Findlay, ' Full docs or it didn't happen '

Antony Funnell, ' Give me a serve of data with that '

Chris Hurley, ' Re-Inventing On-Line Access '

Mike Jones, ' Contrapuntal archival methods '

Richard Lehane, ' Building an integrated digital archives (Part II) '

Charlotte Maday and Magalie Moysan, ' Records management for scientific data '

Julie McLeod, ' Reconceptualising ERM as a wicked problem '

Adelaide Parr, ' In an interconnected world - why do we think in functions? '

Barbara Reed, ' Rethinking approaches to recordkeeping metadata '

Sonya Sherman, ' People telling stories '

Dr Tim Sherratt, ' Contexts, connections, access: the glorious possibilities of getting it all wrong '

Kirsten Thorpe, ' Indigenous Records: connecting, critiquing and diversifying collections '

Andrew Waugh, ' Email - a bellwether records system '

Kirsten Wright, ' Broadening the record and expanding the archives '

Articles also available via Readlist for download to Kindle, iPad, DropBox and more: http://readlists.com/8e8b0ed1/

About Cassie Findlay

Digital archivist and recordkeeping professional, co-founder of the Recordkeeping Roundtable. @CassPF on Twitter.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged archives, recordkeeping, reinvention. Bookmark the permalink.

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Reinventing archival methods: Continuing the conversation

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A collection of articles and short contributions from The Recordkeeping Roundtable, our friends and colleagues, on the theme of archival reinvention. Introduction by Kate Cumming, Cassie Findlay, Anne Picot and Barbara Reed Articles Dr Kate Cumming and Anne Picot 'Reinventing appraisal' Barbara Reed 'Reinventing access' Short contributions Xiaomi An, Hepu Deng, Bin Zhang 'Reinventing the...

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Lecture: The genius of Australian Indigenous Languages, and why they are important for all of us (2018)

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Lecture: The genius of Australian Indigenous Languages, and why they are important for all of us (2018)

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The genius of Australian Indigenous Languages, and why they are important for all of us

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Australia’s Indigenous languages exhibit many interesting and unique properties that have contributed greatly to our understanding of how human beings process and perceive the world around them. However, much of this knowledge has remained within the purview of language scientists, and the broader Australian community still has little awareness of how fascinating Australian Indigenous languages are, and what they teach us about the nature of language more broadly.

In this inaugural professorial lecture, Professor Rachel Nordlinger discusses some of her favourite features of these languages – ranging from unusual grammatical properties, to intriguing word meanings, to the questions they raise about how languages are learned and processed. In doing so, Professor Nordlinger will present the true genius of these languages, and argues that, as well as being important to the communities who speak and treasure them, they should be valued by all of us who are interested in what it is to be human.

Rachel Nordlinger is Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language, in the School of Languages and Linguistics and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Faculty of Arts. This is her inaugural professorial lecture.

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Digital transformations and the archival nature of surrogates (2014)

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Digital transformations and the archival nature of surrogates (2014)

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J26 Conway Digital Transformations 2014-pers.pdf

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Strengthening the Archival Record in the Postcustodial Era (2016)

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Pre-colonial myths

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In conversation with Tony Birch, Bruce Pascoe discusses the writing, research and reception of his groundbreaking, celebrated book Dark Emu - which won Book of the Year at the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. What does challenging the past of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people mean for the present?

Myths about the lives of pre-colonial Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have proven deeply entrenched. But in Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe struck a grievous blow to one of the most widely accepted assumptions of Australian pre-settlement history. He argued, and presented robust evidence drawn from the journals of European explorers, that Indigenous people were not hunter-gatherers at the time of colonisation.

'The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing - behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag,' he has said. The book also challenges existing narratives around housing construction, cooking and clothing prior to European settlement.

Presented in partnership with Yirramboi.

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Listen - Dark Emu: Bruce Pascoe and Tony Birch in Conversation, from The Wheeler Centre

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In conversation with Tony Birch, Bruce Pascoe discusses the writing, research and reception of his groundbreaking, celebrated book Dark Emu - which won Book of the Year at the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. What does challenging the past of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people mean for the present?

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Archives in Liquid Times: a new publication about philosophy and theory on archives. It is free to download in PDF (see below).

Archives in Liquid Times aims to broaden and deepen the thinking about archives in today's digital environment. It is a book that tries to fuel the debate about archives in different fields of research. It shows that in these liquid times, archives need and deserve to be considered from different angles. Archives in Liquid Times is a publication in which archival science is linked to philosophy (of information) and data science. Not only do the contributors try to open windows to new concepts and perspectives, but also to new uses of existing concepts concerning archives.

The articles in this book contain philosophical reflections, speculative essays and presentations of new models and concepts alongside well-known topics in archival theory. Among the contributors are scholars from different fields of research, like Wolfgang Ernst, Geoffrey Yeo, Martijn van Otterlo, Charles Jeurgens, Anne Gilliland and Geert-Jan van Bussel. This book includes interviews with Luciano Floridi and Eric Ketelaar, in which they reflect on key issues arising from the contributions.

The editors are Frans Smit, Arnoud Glaudemans and Rienk Jonker.

The book is published by the Dutch Society for Archival Publications (S@P). It is available as free digital download in PDF and in E-pub format.

Archives in Liquid Times is available on:the website of the Royal Dutch Association of Archivists: (PDF and EPub)
The website of co-editor Rienk Jonker: (PDF and EPub)
Open Access Library: (PDF)
academia.edu: (PDF)

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Archives in Liquid Times: a new publication about philosophy and theory on archives. It is free to download in PDF (see below). Archives in Liquid Times aims to broaden and deepen the thinking about archives in today's digital environment. It is a book that tries to fuel the debate about archives in different fields of research....

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Preprint of an article published in Lligall 41, the journal of the Association of Catalonian Archivists. In the revised edition of ISO 15489-1:2016 Records management, the concept of 'appraisal' takes on a wider scope than is perhaps familiar to some archivists. Rather than being limited to the examination and selection of extant records to make ... More Appraisal: A strategic tool for modern recordkeeping

In Berlin in May 2012, a new International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Working Group was convened and given the task of reviewing and revising the International Standard ISO 15489 on records management. It had been twelve years since the issue of the first edition. In that time, a few attempts to do this revision had ... More Crunch Time: The revised ISO 15489 and the future of recordkeeping

As published recently by the Australian Society of Archivists, in Archives and Manuscripts. Here's my pre-print. Abstract Recordkeeping professionals build and manage systems that support the creation and maintenance of trustworthy records, however our approach to the design and implementation of such systems has suffered from a lack of innovation and a failure to collaborate ... More Participatory cultures, trust technologies and decentralisation: Innovation opportunities for recordkeeping

Recordkeeping professionals seek to design systems that will ensure that trustworthy evidence can be relied upon by the communities we serve, and community memory protected over time. However current recordkeeping implementations are flawed, and permit imperfect recordkeeping, inequitable access to records and records loss. Recordkeeping systems implementations have failed to keep pace with trends towards decentralization and personally controlled personal data. The emergence of decentralised trust through computation as seen with blockchain technologies allows us to imagine new models for recordkeeping that can also bring greater assurance of longevity and availability for records users, and offer new opportunities for individuals to keep their own records. In this post, I consider the problem of enabling children in out of home care to make and keep their own records in light of innovations in decentralised trust mechanisms and specifically blockchain technology, and use the core recordkeeping skill of appraisal to better understand how blockchain technologies might form part of the solution.
... More Ideas on using appraisal techniques to plan for the use of blockchain technologies in recordkeeping systems

Originally posted on Recordkeeping Roundtable:
This week I got a strong response on Twitter for this tweet & image: From my talk last week: we archivists are failing our mission if we keep worrying about backlogs & ignore strategic digital recordkeeping pic.twitter.com/8usLBihDz7 - Cassie Findlay (@CassPF) May 15, 2017 So I thought I'd share an...

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Preprint of an article published in Lligall 41, the journal of the Association of Catalonian Archivists. In the revised edition of ISO 15489-1:2016 Records management, the concept of 'appraisal' takes on a wider scope than is perhaps familiar to some archivists. Rather than being limited to the examination and selection of extant records to make ...

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Participatory cultures, trust technologies and decentralisation:  

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Participatory cultures, trust technologies and decentralisation:  

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Innovation opportunities for recordkeeping (2017)

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As published recently by the Australian Society of Archivists, in Archives and Manuscripts. Here's my pre-print.
Abstract Recordkeeping professionals build and manage systems that support the creation and maintenance of trustworthy records, however our approach to the design and implementation of such systems has suffered from a lack of innovation and a failure to collaborate effectively with allied discipines. Contemporary society, politics and Internet culture are producing new models, tools and techniques which open up exciting possibilities for how recordkeeping systems might work, presenting present both opportunities and challenges for recordkeeping professionals. In this article, some elements deemed necessary for trustworthy recordkeeping are identified and critically examined in light of the possibilities of participatory cultures, peer to peer business and trust through computation, in particular, blockchain technologies. Conclusions are drawn regarding what might be needed in order to adapt current models and practices to build new forms of recordkeeping systems that could enhance the agency of the individual in a networked society. Changing notions of trust in society
The information landscape today is a vast, complex and, at times, dangerous place. Disruptive innovations are challenging some of our fundamental assumptions about what is and is not trustworthy information, while at the same time information is becoming a more significant tool for political action than ever before. The 2016 Presidential election in the United States was dominated by challenges to the truthfulness of candidates and the sharing of 'fake news' online stories to spread disinformation, falsehoods and propaganda. Such efforts were amplified by the enormous reach of social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. As noted by researcher Liliana Bounegru: "social media platforms have acted as engines to channel previously fringe universes of political culture, rooted in right-wing populism and post-truth politics, into the mainstream of American politics." The need for evidence with which to back up claims was seemingly not important to the consumers of this information. Indeed, as noted by Duncan Watts: "a flagrant disregard for consistency and evidence may even be interpreted as a demonstration of power: the power to create one's own reality." Commentators argue that in certain actors' hands, information has become weaponized. This is not a new phenomenon - one only needs to look at the propaganda wars of the past to understand that - but one that is playing out with greater impact and a more widespread awareness amongst the public that it is occurring than was the case in the past.

In parallel with the continuing barrage of information attacks aimed at the public, the gathering of information on citizens by the State and by corporate entities has dramatically escalated. At no point in history has so much data on everyday citizens been gathered, retained and analysed. Personal data has become a new form of currency. Online services often require users to share their personal identity data with a myriad of corporations while having little say in how that information is used, and the monetary benefits of this data are unfairly distributed. What effects flow from the 21 st century panopticon on the trust that we place in our elected representatives and in the providers of services that have become essential to our daily lives? Research has shown that indiscriminate monitoring fosters distrust. In a 2012 study Marie-Helen Maras identified a growing sense of 'otherness' amongst European Union (EU) citizens as a result of knowledge of the existence and use of the databases borne of the EU's data retention directives. Such 'otherness' and perceived lack of personal autonomy comes hand in hand with a lack of trust in those who constructed the databases in which data on us is captured and stored. The notion of the database as embodying this hierarchical relationship between two actors, with all that relationship's shortcomings, has been explored in philosophy. Bruno Latour refers to the example of "data bases (that are) are full of defects, that they themselves embody a rather crude definition of society, that they are marked by strong asymmetries of power, and above all that they mark only a passing moment in the traceability of the ..connections" Instead, Latour proposes models for social behaviour which move from such hierarchical models - which he sees as increasingly unhelpful - to overlapping networks, allowing for more equitable transactions to take place.

In this climate, the need for strong and defensible systems for making and keeping trustworthy records of the actions and decisions of powerful people and organisations is pressing. As noted by Eric Ketelaar, "Records act as instruments of power," The keeping of records by abusive governments serves to oppress its people. By keeping records of abuses, today in the form, for example, of smart phone recordings of police aggression towards minorities, such oppression can be highlighted and resisted. It is only by accessing this evidence, these primary sources, that citizens and fourth estate actors can dig below the so called 'fake news' to uncover the truth. It is only by keeping trustworthy records of our business and the conduct of affairs that there is the possibility of such reporting. It is only by assigning the proper context(s) and management information (metadata) to such records that they will remain available to the right people and groups at the right times. But what do we mean by 'trustworthy'? Trustworthy for whom? When? Is the recordkeeping/archives profession bulding the right kinds of systems for ensuring the continued creation, maintenance and use of such trustworthy records? In an era of unsurpassed surveillance, further questions arise about whether such systems for recordkeeping can embrace Latour's ideas of networks, not hierarchies, in the making and keeping of trustworthy records of our business and affairs. How can we ensure the records remain protected from tampering or loss and available over time? Available when needed, protected when required? In order to begin to conceptualize how new forms of recordkeeping might address some of these questions, it is necessary first to examine some of the trends and innovations that are changing some of society's most basic understanding of how we go about our civil and public lives.
The struggle between network and hierarchy
The socio-political and technological environment in which we live and in which recordkeeping now occurs is undergoing dramatic change. Shifts in societal norms and values, and radical innovations in keeping and sharing information that have occurred over the recent decades since the invention of the World Wide Web are changing society's expectations of recordkeeping. As presaged in Latour's work, it has been argued that society is transitioning from hierarchical to networked models. It's a movement from centralized institutions of mandated trust, to networks of distributed democracy, a phenomenon which Paul Mason, economics editor for the UK's Channel 4 news has described as the 'struggle between network and hierarchy'. These changes have in part been triggered by the use of Internet-based technologies to do business in ways not requiring the traditional gatekeepers and intermediaries. There are various ways to characterize these trends but for the purposes of exploration here they have been labeled and grouped into the following phenomena:

participatory cultures;

peer to peer networks; and

trust through computation.

Most obviously manifested in the rise of social media platforms, participatory cultures have acquired a new prominence and power in the 21 st century. These cultures have been defined by Barney et al as the "the promise and expectation that once can be actively involved with others in decision-making processes that affect the evolution of social bonds, communities, systems of knowledge, and organisations, as well as politics and culture." Like systems for recordkeeping, media-based participatory systems are not about the technologies alone but rather also comprise the "social, cultural, legal, political and economic institutions, practices and protocols that shape and surround them" Participatory cultures reflect the prevailing values of the society in which they operate. In Western, capitalistic democracies, the emerging media environment has become, Jodi Dean argues, an "engine of commerce, consent and control." Or to put it another way: when an online service is free, you're the product. However participatory cultures are also about communities, and benefits flow from the formation and mobilization of communities. As Alberto Melucci explains: "It means both taking part, that is, acting so as to promote the interests and needs of an actor, as well as belonging to a system, identifying with the 'general interests' of the community" A widely recognized example of such communal promotion of interests can be found in the effects of the sharing of blogs and social media content during the Arab Spring, using content from outlets such as WikiLeaks to build political momentum. There are many other examples, on both sides of the political spectrum, from Black Lives Matter to the Alt Right. As noted by Jillian York: "it is clear that participatory media can be a powerful tool to harness energy and attention toward a diverse set of causes, in spite of government attempts to control information and infiltrate networks." An important characteristic of participatory cultures is the centrality and agency of the individual, alongside the strength and power of 'the crowd', united by sentiment or other factors, and connected online.

In parallel with the rise of participatory cultures we have seen the maturation of peer-peer technologies. Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is "a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes." In the 1990s and 2000s, anonymous file sharing sites such as Napster and latterly BitTorrent were the most obvious manifestations of peer to peer technologies to the average Internet user. In these systems, reputation is critical, as it has become in other new economy platforms, such as the ride sharing services Uber or Lyft, or the home sharing service Airbnb. The difference between true P2P and these services is that corporations act as intermediaries, or 'rent-seekers', sitting between the consumer and the service providers, taking their slice of the revenue. True P2P means no such 'middle man' exists, either in technical terms or in terms of the actors' relationships. Instead, trust is supported by systems of reputation, for both the users and purveyors of services.

The arrival in 2008 of a protocol for the transfer of virtual currency (Bitcoin), with the 'blockchain' as its central component, was a major advance for peer to peer, decentralized technologies. In recordkeeping terms, blockchain technology creates a ledger or register. This is a register shared by users around the globe and owned and controlled by no-one. A key distinguishing feature of the blockchain is consensus; the blockchain algorithm enables distributed (global) consensus on who owns what currency. It is proof of work - proof of an action at a point in time (with Bitcoin, the mining and ownership of the currency). With no central authority and no controlling corporation, blockchain technology offers the possibility of decentralized proof which can't be erased or modified by anyone; competitors, third parties or governments. This is what distinguishes using the blockchain from other forms of data timestamping and authentication. It's about moving away from what Nozomi Hayase has called "centralized institutions of mandated trust", to networks of distributed business. Blockchain technologies are, in effect, authenticating mechanisms. Instead of relying on a central authority to certify the authenticity of a transaction, the proof of its veracity via distributed cryptographic confirmation. Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and author Andreas Antonopoulos describes this as trust by computation. Antonopoulos notes: "Trust does not depend on excluding bad actors, as they cannot 'fake' trust. They cannot pretend to be the trusted party, as there is none. They cannot steal the central keys as there are none. They cannot pull the levers of control at the core of the system, as there is no core and no levers of control." Blockchain-based records of transactions are immutable and uncorruptible, and all parties privy to the 'ledger' can evaluate the provenance of the information in it to determine if there has been tampering.

Decentralized, peer to peer systems that utilize blockchain technologies have a number of other commonly agreed advantages, some of which have been neatly outlined by Vitalek Buterin:

fault tolerance- (they are) less likely to fail accidentally because they rely on many separate components that are not linked;

attack resistance- (they are) more expensive to attack and destroy or manipulate because they lack sensitive central points that can be attacked at much lower cost than the economic size of the surrounding system; and

collusion resistance - it is much harder for participants in these decentralized systems to collude to act in ways that benefit them at the expense of other participants, whereas the leaderships of corporations and governments collude in ways that benefit themselves but harm less well-coordinated citizens, customers, employees and the general public all the time.

To date, applications for blockchain technologies have mostly been found in the realms of finance, property, contracts and identity. Amongst these domains we can see requirements for both high volume recordkeeping solutions and for more ad hoc, tailored solutions to specific needs, including:

centralized registries controlled and/or maintained by governments for land ownership;

systems supporting the creation and management of signed contracts with retailers or service providers, records of which are retained by both parties or by one party with limited access for the user;

financial management systems used by banks to record the exchange of money; and

proof of identity systems such as birth registries or systems for confirming eligibility to open bank accounts.

Blockchain technologies are a technological infrastructure for true peer to peer recordkeeping, and, potentially, a tool for personal recordkeeping that fulfils the requirements for persistent, trustworthy records of our own experience, transactions and interactions, to be retained for our purposes and shared at our instruction. A tool that enables greater individual agency as a recordkeeping entity, as opposed to reliance on a mandated trust institution who keeps records on our behalf. It may be argued therefore that, by enabling these defences against corruption of information or accidental loss of information, decentralized systems can claim greater trustworthiness over those that rely on a central authority. Such systems are seen by many has having almost limitless applications - beyond file sharing to new models for governance, and to replace existing economies. Indeed, one of the leading thinkers on P2P, Michel Bauwens, has proposed P2P phenomena as an emerging alternative to capitalist society. However current barriers to entry of understanding how to use the technologies, a lack of user friendly interfaces and the problems associated with energy consumption that their use entails should also not be underestimated.
How has recordkeeping responded to these innovations?
Historically, many recordkeeping system models have mimicked the broader structural features of the society in which they operate. These structural features have predominantly, in political systems like Australia's, been hierarchical in nature. So we can look to the widespread adoption of centralized file registry systems such as those used by Australian colonial authorities, to see the origins of the prevailing model for government records management in the 20 th and early 21 st centuries. Unfortunately our most commonly implemented models for recordkeeping systems have remained stuck in these old paradigms despite the developments described above. Many implementations remain siloed and unable to adequately capture rich context of multiple interacting parties over time, frameworks for information access remain blocked from reform, and centralized power continues to exert influence over the types of records that are created and kept, as well as the failure to document, or to suppress. The possibilities of the Internet to free us from the risks inherent in keeping all of our (archival) eggs in one basket have not been adequately explored. No existing mandated authority is immune today from the risks of defunding or being 'legislated away'. As noted by Peter van Garderen: "even exemplary collections like Trove are subject to economics and the political whims of their owners. In this case, a conservative Australian government that slashed funding and suggested looking for private donors to maintain the collection."

The effects of the inadequacies of today's systems for recordkeeping are serious, and manifold. In addition to failures to capture authoritative records that represent fully the complexity of our lives and business, we can also look at high profile recordkeeping system failures such as the #CensusFail debacle to understand that where there once was almost automatic and unquestioning trust in the recordkeeping practices of governments, this has been seriously eroded. While doing an imperfect job at supporting and advancing the interests of governments, today's recordkeeping systems implementations are also failing to empower groups that are in desperate need of empowerment. Recordkeeping is still stalled in traditional models of centralised control and the writing of history by the powerful - even many projects investigating participatory models for archives start with the assumption that the recordkeeping acts documenting the individual experience are set up and controlled by the more powerful entity.

There are, however, encouraging explorations of alternative models within the recordkeeping profession. Indigenous attitudes to evidence and memory, for example, offer us another perspective on - and an opportunity to learn about - what it means for records to be trusted by a community of people, and for people to have agency in the keeping of those records. In recent years, serious efforts to understand these differences and address them have been undertaken in the archival community. In Australia the Monash University-led Trust and Technology project examined these differences in some depth by speaking to Koorie people, assessing their experience with archival services and exploring new tools and methods. The project's final report notes that: "Koorie knowledge cannot be made to adhere to the usual institutional/sectoral boundaries of archival programs." Amongst its seven key recommendations, the project participants proposed:

a recalibration of the rights of the 'subjects' of records, in this instance Koorie people, to 'set the record straight', and

acknowledging that Koorie people are currently afforded few rights over that part of their knowledge which is in archival institutions, finding ways to give effect to Koorie rights over this knowledge.

We have also, in recent years, seen a significant rise in the creation of community archives online. In his 2011 article "Archival Activism: Independent and Community-led Archives, Radical Public History and the Heritage Professions", Andrew Flinn explores developments in this independent, non-professionalized archival activity, including what he terms "radical or counter-hegemonic public history-making activities." Flinn cites examples that are largely concerned with creating archives that address gaps in official traditional archives; the black LGBT experience in the UK, for example, or the daily lives of the East London working class. In the US, Witness.org's Yvonne Ng has described a number of community-centered archive initiatives that have emerged from Black Lives Matter movement including the Preserve The Baltimore Uprising 2015 Archive Project and Documenting Ferguson. As Ng explains, the projects share a "collaborative approach between traditional archives and archivists, community organizers, and concerned individuals." The Documenting The Now project has developed a tool and a community around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content, with a particular focus on protest movements. Here we see projects that come from a progressive standpoint, interested in themes of equality and anti-discrimination, of claiming a place in history for those who have been hidden or voiceless. These are projects that are products of both our web-based culture and, arguably, a response to early 21 st century 'post-truth politics'.

In contrast, perhaps to the online community archives model described above, we have also recently seen other projects that are more concerned with the agency of the individual as part of the recordkeeping contract. Considering the recordkeeping needs of children who are under the guardianship of the state is, for example, a particularly pressing matter for recordkeeping professionals' attention today. In his remarks at the Australian Society of Archivists conference in Sydney in 2016, care leaver Frank Golding stated: "In the vast majority of cases, the official records do not supply a coherent narrative that meets the need to know the truth about the past, and to tell the truth to others such as our children." Golding further proposed: "Children in out-of-home care today can and should have the right to make a contribution to their record as it develops." What if this idea is extended to the making of their own records? This idea has been taken up by a the Setting the Record Straight: For the Rights of the Child Initiative. The Initiative, which includes a National Summit being held in Melbourne in 2017, was organized, in part, as a response by the Australian recordkeeping community and allied groups to the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Reponses to Child Sexual Abuse, which commenced in 2013 and continues to date. The Initiative calls for "the design and implementation of the infrastructure to support an "independent lifelong living archive for every child who experiences out-of-home care." This is described as: "A secure, distributed, networked, digital archive populated by children themselves and by their care givers, case workers, teachers, and health professionals. It would support a child's identity, memory and time in out-of-home care and be accessible throughout his or her life."

Despite the efforts being made in vanguard projects like those described above, many of us in the recordkeeping profession have, to date, been hampered in our efforts to innovate by a lack of sophistication in the tools we use and by our reliance on institutions of power to serve as verification and authentication agents in recordkeeping processes. We have, it may be argued, failed to fully grasp the opportunities presented by internet phenomena and technologies described above, making the job of meeting the needs of people and communities seeking recordkeeping systems of their own much more difficult. Internet based innovation and a flatter, more peer- peer based model for recordkeeping have the potential now,however, to come together in new forms of recordkeeping systems that overcome problems associated with trust, fragility and resourcing. Systems which have the potential to rebalance the scales in the making and keeping of records of the individual experience. However in order for the profession to make useful a contribution to the design of such systems, we must be sure we understand what we ourselves mean by trust in recordkeeping.
Existing understandings of trust in recordkeeping
The recordkeeping and archives community as a whole has conducted extensive research and developed many standards and guides on how records and the systems that make and keep them may be regarded as trustworthy by the communities they serve. This includes requirements from standards from the International Standards Organisation and national bodies as well as research and guidance from international collaborative projects like the InterPARES (International Research into the Preservation of Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) project. It also includes work that has focused on the role, governance strcutures and capabilities of custodians and the functionalities of repositories, such as sets of requirements and standards for trustworthy repositories developed on the basis of the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) reference model or the Trusted Third Party Repositories (TTPR) model, originally developed in South Korea. What do these investigations tell us about notions of trust as it is understood in the recordkeeping and archives world?

Since the adoption of the ideas of David Bearman by Australian recordkeeping professionals in the mid 1990s, the development of the first Australian Standard on records management, AS 4390, in 1996, and the contemporaneous emergence of records continuum theory at Monash University, Australian recordkeeping theory and practice has focused heavily on the notion of the recordkeeping system and its processes, driven by the use and management of metadata for records, as the means for making and keeping trustworthy records, in any context and over time. Since this period, these concepts and principles have been used in the development many tools and guides, including the widely adopted 'DIRKS' methodology (Designing and Implementing Recordkeeping Systems), the first International Standard on records management, ISO 15489:2001 Records Management and its successor, ISO 15489:2016 Records Management. Such approaches favour routine, predictable processes for making and managing records, based on decisions (preferably accountable and consultative) by the recordkeeping system owner about what records are made, why, for whom and how they are to be managed.

Other projects concerned with the trustworthiness in recordkeeping have identified the resources, reputation and trustworthiness of the custodian or repository as a means to assuring the trustworthiness of the records. A report from the second phase of the InterPARES project from 2008, for example, stated that a "trusted custodian should be designated as the preserver of the creator's records." However the ubiquity of the Internet across all facets of business and society has since prompted a greater focus on how this kind of understanding translates to the online world. A successor to the earlier InterPARES work, the InterPARES Trust (ITrust 2013-2018) is a multi-national, interdisciplinary research project exploring issues concerning digital records and data entrusted to the Internet, including with the adoption of models and methods described in this article. It's research goal is described as: "frameworks that will support the development of integrated and consistent local, national and international networks of policies, procedures, regulations, standards and legislation concerning digital records entrusted to the Internet, to ensure public trust grounded on evidence of good governance, and a persistent digital memory." Amongst the products to date is Vicki Lemieux's 2016 analysis of blockchain technologies against requirements for trustworthy recordkeeping drawn from ISO 15489 and the United States' Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles (GARP). Lemieux found that a mix of technical and non technical controls will always be needed to engender trust in records, and that blockchain in itself cannot guarantee trust. As the technology matures, we are indeed seeing the emergence of a variety of non technical mechanisms being put in place to help user communities and others who rely on blockchain records to trust them.

The digital preservation community, closely associated with the recordkeeping and archives world, has also placed emphasis on the importance of trust in its models and best practice standards. This can be seen, for example, in standards for trusted digital repositories. Greg Bak has examined the notion of trust in relation to standards that have been widely adopted for keeping digital archives, using the Trusted Digital Repositorys project at Library and Archives Canada as a case study. Bak proposes that it is user perceptions of trust which matter, rather than relying on standards, audits and certification, and that archives and other memory institutions should move away from proclaiming themselves to be trusted, to proposing that they can be trustworthy. He explains that this is not what he terms a technocratic version of trust, one that depends on technology and mandate, but rather it is about the formation and sustaining of relationships within a community. This is perhaps a challenging notion to many government archives, given that, as Hugh A. Taylor observed in the 1980s: "Most of our customers do not complain since we enjoy a monopoly of the business. There is nowhere else to go." Much has changed in the information landscape since that time, including in relation to access to government records. And yet it is also true that public trust in government and its agencies is at an all time low in many Western democracies. The failure of our recordkeeping tools and techniques to keep pace with changes in society - as demonstrated by #CensusFail and many other less high profile cases - has no small part in this.

Regardless of the extent to which an organisational recordkeeping system or institutional archive might successfully promote itself as a trustworthy keeper of records, however, problems remain. We understand today that in fact the reliance on any actor - government, business, charity, church or other - to control and fund the necessary infrastructure for recordkeeping activity allows, whether to a minor or severe degree, a perspective bias that effects how records are made and kept, and also leaves open the possibility of corruption. This problem - especially where financial matters were concerned - brought about the idea of recordkeeping that need not rely on the use of a recordkeeping system controlled by either of the parties involved in a transaction. This idea of a neutral space in which records needing to be trusted and protected for the benefit of multiple parties may be made and kept is found in the work done in the International Standards arena on the Trusted Third Party Repository (TTPR). The TTPR was developed as a solution to problems associated with asserting authenticity and ensuring longevity for digital records, particularly in instances where those records may be subject to legal challenge. The team behind the TTPR's development into an International Standard have said: "In many cases legal admissibility of digital records managed by organization's records systems cannot be ensured. As a result, there is a growing need for services by neutral third parties which guarantee these characteristics for digital records." The similiarity between the goals of the TTPR inititative and the way that blockchain technologies are designed to enable trust but without need of a 'trusted third party' are noticeable.
A new paradigm?
Reviewing these projects, we might summarise what has been generally been regarded as important for trustworthy recordkeeping required as:

1. a person, entity or community with the authority, means and ability to design, implement and maintain a recordkeeping system;

2. a person, entity or community who can make realistic assurances of the integrity and persistence of the records it keeps, now and into the future; and

3. a set of routine, accountable and agreed processes for making and managing records; and

4. for some types of transactions, a trusted third party who can verify the authenticity of the record(s) of the transaction.

Turning back to lessons learned from the emerging networked society, we might then add to these requirements a need for:

recordkeeping systems structures that give greater agency to the individual, rather than to the institutions that have traditionally had the required resourcing, mandate and status to keep 'verified' records.

By integrating the principles and tools of the networked society into existing recordkeeping models, exciting opportunities for person-centric, trustworthy systems of recordkeeping. In such systems, records are regarded as authentic by virtue of (machine-enabled) community consensus rather than through control by an institution of economic or state-sanctioned power. In this way, our implementations could perhaps have a chane of rebalancing the inherent power structures of recordkeeping systems in ways that align with Latours ideas on networks. Such systems, once established, would present a low barrier to entry for many types of communities, requiring little human captital for maintenance and no centralized infrastructure. Could this be the beginnings of a response to the Setting the Record Straight: For the Rights of the Child Initiative's call for an 'independent lifelong living archive', the needs of community archiving projects and other emerging recordkeeping problems?
How do we get there?
To start to consider this question we must return to core recordkeeping understandings. Appraisal - explained using the Australiasian understanding of this activity in the latest edition of the International Standard ISO 15489 as the recurrent analysis of context, business, requirements and risk for the purposes of defining what records to make and how to manage them - is an essential starting point. By conducting appraisal we can gather data on:

the cultural, technological and socio-legal contexts in which the recordkeeping takes place - including the legal framework;

the agents and stakeholders involved in the 'business' at hand;

a detailed understanding of the recordkeeping needs and expectations of these actors; and

a detailed set of requirements for records and their management that addresses questions of access, use and usability, metadata and retention.

The design and implementation of recordkeeping processes based on the results of such appraisal will then, for a decentralized, blockchain-based model, need to take account of some of the key characteristics of these technologies. Design decisions will need to start with an acknowledgement that records today are most usefully conceptualised as collections of data, inclusive of contextualizing metadata and metadata that both manages and accounts for events in the record's existence. In a blockchain-based implementation, it is unlikely that the full content of records will be recorded in the ledger, but that instead it will serve the purpose of a traditional ledger. That is, to register a business event, whether it be a financial transaction or acceptance of a contract. Of course records will often be comprised of different types of data, including in unstructured forms such as documents. It is possible to register the existence of a document (PDF or JPEG, for example), using a hash that is recorded in a blockchain, but this is just a 'fingerprint' for the document, not the document's full content. Where additional elements of the record require linkage to such data or documents, it will be achieved logically, using identifiers and locational metadata. These other elements might exist in any other system, but to truly take advantage of decentralization, a decentralized storage and management system could be implemented. Examples of such systems include the Interplanetary File System or Storj. The design and implementation of recordkeeping based on blockchain technologies will also need to address questions of access and use over time. Data on blockchains is by default unencrypted, and indeed its model is built on the availability of the data to all in the network. However there are mechanisms by which access can be restricted - for example by encrypting certain elements on a blockchain and handing out the keys to the relevant participants. These problems of restricting access are primarily concerned with the blockchain ledger records, as opposed to decentralized strorage solutions noted above, which generally enable access control in more conventional - and familiar - ways.

Using these understandings we might be able to arrive at a systems architecture in which is based on robust recordkeeping analysis and embraces decentralised technologies (amongst a mix of technical and non technical elements), with the individual intereacting and recording their own interactions. For each recordkeeping requirement, we must think beyond the institutional, the separate 'capture' of records by agents involved in the transactions, and think instead of co-creation and keeping of records using a system that is designed and operated by consensus amongst a family, a community, an institution or a government, and which requires minimal maintenance once established. Metadata which supports access and permissions at a granular level. A secure digital identity which can serve as an anchor for both civic life and personal memory making.
A call to action
There are a plethora of projects, from the academic research, business and government domains that recordkeeping professionals can learn from in constructing these new-paradigm systems. Just a small sample includes:

Peter Van Garderen has proposed a 'Decentralised Autonomous Collection' architecture, to enable a set of digital information objects to be stored for ongoing re-use with the means and incentives for independent parties to participate in the contribution, presentation, and curation of the information objects outside the control of an exclusive custodian. In this model, recordkeeping requirements could be encoded as business rules by its initial implementers and, Van Garderen proposes, updated by its subsequent participants using smart contracts deployed on blockchain technology.

A number of projects and commercial enterprises are the building applications for identity management and personally controlled data storage utilizing blockchain technologies. These include the Enigma project at MIT and the Estonia e-residency initiative. Such tools could be adapted to the needs of a particular community and serve as a repository for identity data as well as a registry for personal records, linked to a distributed file storage platform such as the Inter Planetary File Systems (IPFS).

Smart contracts based on blockchain technologies can negotiate rights, payments and the performance of services automatically. Smart contracts could be designed to offer trustworthy exchange of value or information between members of a community. The robustness of the recordkeeping in this environment could serve to protect the interests of participants without the need to involve a centralized authority. Metadata could be incorporated into the recording of the exchanges that links to additional contextual information about the agents, functions and records that make up the activity, offering a richer record for future use and memory-keeping. A candidate for the development of such contracts is Ethereum, a public blockchain platform.

Looking forward
Decentralized technologies and public ledgers are still finding their place in the world. The networked society is pushing back against a worldwide lurch towards authoritarianism and ubiquitous online surveillance. At this time and place, recordkeeping, made more available for genuine participation by all, using community-agreed rules, languages and structure, secure and private when needed, with the sustainable preservation of this evidence and memory, is more needed than ever. Partnerships with potential user communities, developers and digital service designers will be essential to the effort to make the creation, capture and use of recordkeeping processes that rely on blockchain technologies 'fit for purpose' and user-friendly, whatever their objective. Recordkeeping expertise, and in particular accountable and thorough appraisal work and the use of innovative methods for deploying records controls using metadata will be critical in these efforts as we, as a profession, look to position our skills set in this new networked society.
References
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Greg Bak, 'Trusted by whom? TDRs, standards culture and the nature of trust.' Archival Science 16, no. 4 (2016): 373-402

Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne and Tamar Tembeck (ed.s), The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Michel Bauwens, The Political Economy of Peer Production, available at: < https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14464/5306&gt;, accessed 21 April 2017

Liliana Bounegru, 'Three ways in which digital researchers can shed light on the information politics of the "post-truth" era', available at < http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/02/06/three-ways-in-which-digital-researchers-can-shed-light-on-the-information-politics-of-the-post-truth-era/&gt;, accessed 20 April 2017

Vitalek Buterin 'The Meaning of Decentralization' (n.d.) Retrieved from: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274#.npi0wpwl5

Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), June 2012, available at: < https://public.ccsds.org/Pubs/650x0m2.pdf&gt;, accessed 27 April 2017.

Terry Cook and Gordon Dodds (ed.s) Imagining Archives: Essays and Reflections by Hugh A. Taylor, Scarecrow Press, 2003, p124

Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009

Luciana Duranti, Jim Suderman and Malcolm Todd, 'A Framework of Principles for the Development of Policies, Strategies and Standards for the Long-term Preservation of Digital Records', March 2008, available at: < http://www.interpares.org/public_documents/ip2(pub)policy_framework_document.pdf&gt;, accessed 28 April 2017

Andrew Flinn, 'Archival Activism: Independent and Community-led Archives, Radical Public History and the Heritage Professions' InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 7(2), 2011. Available at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9pt2490x

Frank Golding, 'The Care Leaver's Perspective', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 44, no. 3, p162

Nozomi Hayase, 'The Blockchain is a New Model of Governance', Coin Desk, July 26, 2015 available at: < http://www.coindesk.com/consensus-algorithm-and-a-new-model-of-governance/&gt; accessed on 21 April 2017

International Standard ISO/TR 17068:2012, Information and documentation - Trusted third party repository for digital records, available from: < https://www.iso.org/standard/58087.html&gt;, accessed 27 April 2017.

Eric Ketelaar, 'Archival Temples, Archival Prisons:Modes of Power and Protection', Archival Science, vol. 2, 2002, pp 221-238

Bruno Latour, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin and Dominique Boullier 'The whole is always smaller than its parts' - a digital test of Gabriel Tardes' monads' The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 63, issue 4, December 2012, pp 590-615

Vicki Lemieux, 'Trusting records: is Blockchain technology the answer?', Records Management Journal, Vol. 26 Issue 2, pp.110-139

Antony Lewis, 'So, You Want to Use a Blockchain for That?' Coin Desk, July 22, 2016, available at < http://www.coindesk.com/want-use-blockchain/>, accessed 14 July 2017

Sue McKemmish, 'Evidence of Me' The Australian Library Journal, volume 45, 1996, issue 3, pp 184-1987

Marie-Helen Maras, 'The social consequences of a mass surveillance measure: What happens when we become the 'others'?' International Journal of Law Crime and Justice, 40(2), April 2012

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Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989), 174

Monash University Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Koorie Archiving: Trust and Technology - Final report, available at: https://www.monash.edu/it/our-research/research-centres-and-labs/cosi/projects/trust/deliverables/final-report accessed 21 April 2017

Yvonne Ng, 'Community-Based Approaches to Archives from the Black Lives Matter Movement', Witness.Org. Available at: https://blog.witness.org/2015/09/community-based-approaches-to-archives-from-the-black-lives-matter-movement/

Duncan Watts, 'Rebuilding legitimacy in a post-truth age', available at < https://medium.com/@duncanjwatts/rebuilding-legitimacy-in-a-post-truth-age-2f9af19855a5&gt; accessed 20 April 2017

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Notes
Preserve The Baltimore Uprising 2015 Archive Project, available at: http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/

The InterPARES Project was an international research initiative in which archival scholars, computer engineering scholars, national archival institutions and private industry representatives are collaborating to develop the theoretical and methodological knowledge required for the permanent preservation of authentic records created in electronic systems.

Pittsburgh, 1994) on functional requirements for evidence in recordkeeping.

This may be demonstrated in the metrics on trust and credibility gathered, for example, for the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, a study involving 33,000 respondents across 28 countries. The Edelman report found that two-thirds of the countries surveyed are "distrusters" (under 50 percent trust in the mainstream institutions of business, government, media and NGOs to do what is right). Edelman, 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, 2017, available at: http://www.edelman.com/trust2017/, accessed 22 April 2017. Thanks to Barbara Reed (@BarbaraREED) for linking to this on Twitter.

Image credit: By Martin Grandjean [CC BY-SA 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

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Participatory cultures, trust technologies and decentralisation: Innovation opportunities for recordkeeping

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As published recently by the Australian Society of Archivists, in Archives and Manuscripts. Here's my pre-print. Abstract Recordkeeping professionals build and manage systems that support the creation and maintenance of trustworthy records, however our approach to the design and implementation of such systems has suffered from a lack of innovation and a failure to collaborate...

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Repatriating Knowledge in the Networked Archive of the 21st Century (2018)

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Repatriating Knowledge in the Networked Archive of the 21st Century (2018)

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REPK - 2018-02-20 MCARTHY ET AL_OHRM_FINAL.docx