Team 1 - Multimedia Archives
Within libraries, archives and museums, assets have historically been managed differently. Curators, archivists, and other professionals with intimate knowledge of objects meticulously describe them in ways that are specific to their domains of interest, and that creates challenges when assets are gradually being shifted towards management by information systems. Additionally, the development of many systems often reinforces traditional professional roles that have been increasingly blurred with technology and the Internet, particularly related to the authority of archives themselves.
Our group would like to take a holistic view of understanding how archives are being managed, identify specific concerns of stakeholders in the ecosystem and hope to come up recommendations for best practices for managing artifacts, including encoding objects with metadata and using computational techniques to span use cases. Our intention is to not look at a single digital collection to architect a system that works with those holdings; rather, we see that approach as being part of the larger problem in developing service systems for these institutions. We’ll seek to address more abstract use-cases, and focus on two collections for our research: the Weston Havens House, and the Kitchen Sisters archive.
Our research will include a literature review related to the topics of convergence among these institutions, interviews with professionals at libraries, archives, and museums that may be stakeholders, and technologists who have worked to develop similar systems in the past in order to study existing systems and evaluate pros and cons.
