joshuatjFuturing archives - Imagining the records and archives professions in 2050
Panelist (R-L):
Dr Diane Velasquez (organised the panel, but unfortunately couldn't be present)
Dr Elizabeth Tait, Uni of South Australia
Gillian Oliver, Monash Uni
Louise Curham, Curtin Uni
Narissa Timbery, Monash Uni
Louise Curham:
2050. Futuring. Come together to think [discuss] about the problems we face rather than someone else should do something about it.
1. Archives and collections institutions see themselves as brokers.
2. Data sovereignty. Implications more broadly for the community
3. Add to CARE & FAIR simple phrases, important rich messages - respect, responsibility and obligation. Obligation to connect ppl to record.
4. [Next post]
4. Deal with Digital.
5. Manage to explain what we do by 2050.
6. Traces. Evidence.
Narissa Timberry:
It starts with education. Response to royal commission "bring them home". Training indigenous archivist. Build a workforce more knowledgeable in this space.
Dr Elizabeth Tait:
Born digital complex media brought the need to properly manage and preserve information to the forefront. Other professions are starting to take note.
World becomes smaller. How do we ensure we can keep these education going?
Louise Curham:
Education is a privilege. Was at #SEAPAVAA2024 in [Solo, Indonesia]. Encourage everyone to participate in #SEAPAVAA2025, probably in Fiji. https://seapavaaconference.com/
Training. Access to skills. How can we deliver that?
(Thanks Louise for the s/o to #SEAPAVAA2025 🎉🎉🕺🕺)
Gillian Oliver:
Build up social capital. Respect to people who knows what we do. When they need help, they can call upon us. [Professional Identity]
Dr Elizabeth:
Many ways to do this
Professional association
Professional degree
Certification
Practical cert (study + work). Might be more appealing for career transition.
Audience response:
Formal education don't match actual day-to-day practical stuff. Did most of my training from CSU. Took out practical component. Hard when face with hands-on practical stuff. Started with diploma library technician. Archives missing this part, don't have physical part of archiving. One thing archives don't do well.
Audience (South Africa) response:
Uni of South Africa. 30 years old country. Lots of transformation going on. Started to design Bachelors degree in Archives management. Want to give students online degree but year 3 and 4, need to do hands-on practical. Archival theory doesn't speak to the situation in Africa. We're doing a lot in space. By 2027, hopefully we can launch bachelor archives and record management.
Audience (South Australia):
No formal education. Research stolen generation. Help them establish community archive. Deal with community every day of the week. Major gap between institution and community. Archives must involve the community. How we access, store, sensitivity of records. Important to work with community. Listen to what they're saying.
Narissa:
Cultural sensitivity. It's about embedding perspective. Can't speak to everyone. Need to know who's your community, need to work together. Need to listen. If we train people in this space, I hope we would know it's important to deal with this properly by 2050.
Xander Hunter (online response):
...more archivists with data management/data scientist backgrounds. Forge a bridge between records, information and data to ensure records are identified, captured and kept for the future. And that people know how to negotiate their long term preservation as there are many challenges to do this. Any thoughts on how we can achieve this?
(love the s/o to #DigitalPreservation #LongTermAccess #DigiPres)
...continued
"data people don't always realise they are creating records."
#ota2024 #OpeningTheArchives2024 #DigiPres #DataPreservation
Louise:
Born digital is here. Need to face this. Archives community need to be equipped to deal with this. Train data scientist and IT professionals with archiving knowledge.
Gillian: Authenticity. Provenance. Trust. Data folks are actively dealing with this right now. We might not need to know how to work with data. But we need to know how to communicate to this cognate roles. IT/Data folks said "wouldn't it be great if we have archivist in the room." but sometimes archivist response was "this is data, too messy. Not us."
Audience response (Western Australia):
Encourage you to seek to be on the table. We have something to offer. We keep getting invited back.
How do we start gaining experience?
Narissa: need to have pathway. I had a masters and I couldn't get a job. Dream - funding to support community archivist. Stay on country. Access managed by community.
Louise: SEAPAVAA. Learned about the training gap. Equity of access. How complex is our job? So many ARC projects with archive in the title, no archivist involvement. No training, good at managing collections. Really split with the value add for archive management course. Archivist - so much theory. Implication - it could be hot air (perception)
Audience response: Archival thinking enriches practice. Library move to archives field. Intellectual component. Continuum. Not paying enough attention to creation of records. Digital world. More important than ever. Personhood. Respect. Think of this more in the data space. Story: Last of historian to work on paper based resources. We need to think about this in the archival world. Huge validity of archival theory in practice.
Audience response: Intellectual foundation. Thoughtful, caring archivist, think about impact to people. We have to train future information professional to be thoughtful and considerate. Churning out one year short course is not the way to do that. Ethical imperative.
Audience response: Intellectual underpinning. Theoretical and intellectual way to look at things. Fair and justice. Good way to keep our profession going.
Audience: volunteers. Heard at this conference, we need to pay. Retirees volunteers. Describing every photograph. What we need to help ppl find these items in the system. Recently, student asking to be volunteers. System allows 4 hours a week. A lot of work to archivist. Students have some theoretical foundation but no skills. We are helping them with applying knowledge and skills. Not exploiting them.
(Mentorship. Giving experience very important.)
Anahera: When is it too late to educate? To open up archives? Example, GenAI, we are too late.
Narissa: Archives - we get it in the end. How early? There's a research about working with kids.
Louise: #DigitalPreservation community. Community Watch. Technology Watch. Digital Curation Diagram (Onion). Centre digital objects. 3rd layer, community watch. Keeping your eye going on with people. What's coming down the pipe? So that we don't get there too late.
Anahera: Our babies would be users of the repository/archives. When should we start educate our kids?
Narissa: was asked, "Why don't you go to high school to go talk to them about this?" To start young.
Dr Elizabeth: RIMPA. Teaching archives to primary kids. Maybe projects of collecting.
Louise: been talking to ASA picture book about archiving. Our main role: why the recordkeeping mission matter? Rewarding moment. It's never too late.
Louise: Part of the disinformation discussion. Who is the most authorative source? It's us - archives.
@prwheatley: how can archivist in 2050 can take on the digital challenge?
Dr Elizabeth: Working together. Technology, tend to sort itself out. Core skills, foundation, principles, what really matters. Ensure we keep having these conversations. Bring people together, makes sure they understand.
Gillian: 2050, to survive we need to have self-confidence. Contested occupational landscape.
Louise: Confidence. Profile. Re: Paul - GLAM convergence. Archivist -> Digital archivist. We are good with aggregation. S/o to @tjowens - Lots to learn from archivist. Archivist used to dealing with scale.
Get behind the command line, take charge of the future.
Narissa: in my space, we haven't sort out the physical yet. Need to get experts from different areas. To work out what's gonna happen? Digitisation is great, make things accessible. But there's some concerns. Analogue still a big problem for us.
Paul Wheatley@joshuatj when will ASA have an AIP constructing competition instead of a box folding competition? 😉
@prwheatley iPRES need to have it first? Craft SIP/AIP by hand using Notepad++ or vim. Then run it through soem validates.