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The “background” section for the presentation I will be giving Friday at the Northwestern Ontario Archivists’ Association symposium “History in a Digital World.”

Some of this is lifted directly from a short paper I wrote on the same general subject last year. Really, it’s stuff I’ve been paying attention to and thinking about for ages.

Other contents: “Who are your online users?”, “Case studies” where I get to talk with and about some really interesting people, and “Presentation and authenticity in online exhibits” which gets into the “what should archives actually be doing” realm.

This is all a work in progress, so comments, criticisms, and the like are very, very welcome.

When you combine the exponential increase in internet use with the general rise of interest in history and heritage over the past few decades, it makes sense that people are more and more heavily using the internet to access historical material.

This has put cultural heritage institutions in a rush to get all the good, solid information online as quickly as possible. There is a stark awareness that the public’s understanding of history is dependent on the segments of the documentary record that are available: if it can’t be read, it can’t be known about. In recent years, this has roughly translated to “if it isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.”

So we digitize collections and we build web exhibits. This sort of public work has definite benefits – not only does our public have better access to heritage materials online, but we are able to increase general awareness of our holdings and our role in the community. The archives or the museum is no longer just a building. 

The purpose of putting cultural heritage material online need not be to create a formal educational experience. Most people, when visiting a museum, tend to explore the exhibits casually, and socially, rather than looking at every single artifact and reading every single piece of text in the order it was intended by the exhibit designer.

This sort of social browsing behaviour isn’t seen in archives, because they aren’t set up to allow it. We are used to people visiting with particular research questions in mind, and we find for them records that will be relevant to those questions.

But both of these behaviours can be supported simultaneously on the web.

If it were as easy to visit museums, archives, and libraries around the world in person, at any time, then we’d be used to the sort of user context we are now facing. As it stands, there have been major opportunities in how we reach and connect with the public since the rise of, and now ubiquity of, the web from the 1990s on.

This means connecting with new user groups, allowing people to browse and interact with archival material in casual or fun ways, and encouraging them to share their own interpretations and presentations of cultural heritage material.

Let’s take care of some definitions and language.

Definition: “cultural heritage material”

This is a phrase I really like, and will be using throughout this presentation, to refer to things like archival records, museum objects, books, recordings … basically anything that might make up content in an exhibit. I think it’s useful not to cling too much to the differences between different types of institutions when we’re talking about user experience, and particularly when we’re talking about user experience on the web.

Social networking versus social media:

Social networking sites are about individual people, creating a personal online identity: things like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. Social media is about sharing activities, photographs and other media. “Social” because they are used to make connections with people who share those interests. But it’s about the media rather than individual identity. Examples: flickr, YouTube.

Presence for marketing versus presence for contribution:

There’s a big definition between using social media or social networking sites for marketing, and using them to share content.

There are loads of great examples of archives, museums, and libraries using sites like Facebook or Twitter to raise awareness of their own activities. You can share information about the institution, solicit feedback, let people know about events or activities.

But keep in mind when we’re talking about institutional presence on social media that there’s a big difference between this sort of thing and institutions participating on sites like flickr or YouTube, where they would be sharing their content using exactly the same platform open to anyone else, and opening up that content to reuse and reinterpretation.

I won’t be talking at all today really about the marketing uses. There’s loads of literature available on that subject if you’re interested.  

Definition: “online curation”

I will be using the term “online curation” to refer to the act of setting up a web exhibit or web collection of cultural heritage material. In the most general term this involves collecting (bringing things together for a particular effect), presenting things in a particular order or grouping, and providing some degree of background or contextual material.

Last night I attended the “Lost City” panel discussion, sponsored by Keep Toronto Reading 2008. The host was CBC’s Matt Galloway, and panel speakers were Matthew Blackett, Barbara Hall, Christopher Hume, and Brad J. Lamb.

The event was billed as a debate; however, I was genuinely disappointed by the lack of open debate or dialogue. The panelists seemed to spend very little effort in interacting with each other, instead responding individually to the questions: the thing could have been held as four separate interviews.

The few times that panelists responded directly to each other’s statements, it got heated, quickly. I got a distinct sense of hostility and blame — whether they were baling each other, or parties like the OMB which were not represented.

The question period did not much help — it became more of a forum for the airing of particular grievances, which were then shot down by panelists, than a discussion of public concerns.

All of which made me wonder: is it possible to have open, non-aggressive dialogue on Toronto’s relationship to its architecture, old and new? Or is this a subject which is fraught with too many decades of antagonism for anything to be achieved in a public forum?

Panelists argued that a benign meritocracy in the form of an architectural board would be empowered to make the decisions that benefit us all, but is there really no room for public input in such things?

And what does any of this have to do with cultural heritage and preservation? Some specific ideas that were brought up, and my responses to them, below:

• We care about the past, but haven’t figured out how to incorporate it into our lives. (Hume)
  • True. For most people, an interest in history is one of the first priorities to be deferred as soon as other issues come up.
  • As the general public can be apathetic in times of duress, it does fall to professionals to ensure that preservation is still an active priority, for when records or artefacts are again seen to be of cultural importance.
  • On the other hand, it’s important not to be preserving records for their sake alone: the archivist must trust that at some point in the future, those records will be again in use and valuable to education, history, or some other venture.

Then, in opposition:

• We don’t have a culture that values history. (Hall) She implies that in order for legislative changes to occur, there must be grassroots interest in history.
• It’s the wrong sort of people who attend consultations, the most vocal minority only. (Lamb)
• Public consultation process is made to be deliberately intimidating. (Audience member.)
  • Developers and politicians are thus in some way puppets of the zeitgeist. They have no responsibility except when directed by majority of the public.
  • This goes counter to other views expressed, that experts are better equipped to make these decisions than the public.
  • Is it possible to encourage the public to develop a stronger interest in history, without endorsement and awareness coming from the political ranks?
  • Improving the accessibility of public consultation to “regular” informed citizens would only improve it, and improve respect for the process from all sides.
  • It was expressed that wonderful things are being done by volunteers all the time. If this is a valued function for our culture, should there not be professional or paid positions serving this function? Saying “volunteers will do it” marginalizes the role.

The way we think about history and preservation is coloured by what’s gone before, and strongly affects what of us will be preserved in the future:

• Preservation is often an elitist venture. (Hall)
• Historic buildings are not consciously destroyed so often as let go. (Hume)
• The buildings under discussion were not built to last, and preserving them is too much of a challenge; more of a challenge than developers are able to take on without special incentives. (Lamb)
  • The implication is that things which are planned to last have fewer barriers to preservation
  • Also, as we preserve those things which are easy to preserve, that presents the future view of the past — and those things which were preservable “must have” been of greater value to their creators. This creates a skewed perception of history.
  • The way we build things today (from landmark buildings to electronic documents) is a gigantic deciding factor in how long they will be around, regardless of how valuable they are deemed to be.