41 research outputs found
Many Hands / Whose Hands? Archiving the Web, Collaboratively
No full textThese are the slides, speaker notes, and citations from the Spring 2018 New England Archivists (NEA) and Archivists Roundtable of New York (ART) Joint Meeting presentation by Samantha Abrams, Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, and Amy Wickner, "Many Hands / Whose Hands? Archiving the Web, Collaboratively." Web archiving brings new narratives and sociotechnical challenges into archival spaces. The breadth, depth, and ephemerality of collective and individual experiences of the web demands collaborative archival approaches. How can archivists, creators, and subjects of web-based material together establish context-sensitive, ethical approaches to web archiving? This session focuses on working together to capture the live web efficiently, comprehensively, and sensitively. With sustainability, collection building, and division of labor as central themes, we’ll discuss experiences with outreach, collection policy development, and maintenance. We’ll also consider strategies to advocate for the documentation of the web within and beyond institutional infrastructures. We hope to leave participants with both answers and questions as they embark upon their own collaborations
Many Hands / Whose Hands? Archiving the Web, Collaboratively
No full textThese are the slides, speaker notes, and citations from the Spring 2018 New England Archivists (NEA) and Archivists Roundtable of New York (ART) Joint Meeting presentation by Samantha Abrams, Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, and Amy Wickner, "Many Hands / Whose Hands? Archiving the Web, Collaboratively." Web archiving brings new narratives and sociotechnical challenges into archival spaces. The breadth, depth, and ephemerality of collective and individual experiences of the web demands collaborative archival approaches. How can archivists, creators, and subjects of web-based material together establish context-sensitive, ethical approaches to web archiving? This session focuses on working together to capture the live web efficiently, comprehensively, and sensitively. With sustainability, collection building, and division of labor as central themes, we’ll discuss experiences with outreach, collection policy development, and maintenance. We’ll also consider strategies to advocate for the documentation of the web within and beyond institutional infrastructures. We hope to leave participants with both answers and questions as they embark upon their own collaborations
Recognizing Co-Creators in Four Configurations: Critical Questions for Web Archiving
No full textFour categories of co-creator shape web archivists\u27 practice and influence the development of web archives: social forces, users and uses, subjects of web archives, and technical agents. This paper illustrates how these categories of co-creator overlap and interact in four specific web archiving contexts. It recommends that web archivists acknowledge this complex array of contributors as a way to imagine web archives differently. A critical approach to web archiving recognizes relationships and blended roles among stakeholders; seeks opportunities for non-extractive archival activity; and acknowledges the value of creative reuse as an important aspect of preservation
Using the Memory Lab: Values, Impacts, and Discourses
No full textPersonal digital archiving is how individuals accumulate, organize, store, and preserve digital possessions in their personal lives. New initiatives like the Memory Lab at the DC Public Library increasingly bring DIY digital conversion and preservation practices into public spaces. In order to study the values and impacts of such services and the discourses they activate, I interviewed 13 library staff and patrons about their experiences with personal digital archiving resources at DCPL. Interviewees emphasized values and impacts such as access to resources and the library's role in supporting digital literacy, as well as obstacles to participation including the difficulty of learning new skills and technologies. A critical discourse analysis of one interview reveals additional discourses at play: personal digital archiving at the public library can be valued as a resource for managing (having power over) change, a means of re-situating identity, and a vehicle for (re)imagining the future. This research contributes to our understanding of the narratives and attitudes that shape emerging personal digital archiving practices
Archival Workers as Climate Advocates
No full textReal-life examples of climate response under material constraints capture the risks facing archives, records, and archival workers amid environmental change, and the factors that complicate climate action. In this dissertation, I sought to understand how climate, environment, and ecology shape archival workers' experiences, practices, and perspectives on the future, including their norms and expectations for making change. I used three interconnected methods: a critical review of six decades of scholarly and professional literature; a literary analysis of archival practices in seven climate fiction texts; and interviews with 13 archivists concerned about climate change. The core argument of this dissertation is that forms of slow violence – Nixon's term for harm that “occurs gradually and out of sight” – produce unresolvable double binds, which catalyze archival workers into a community of climate advocates.
This research finds that archival workers are trying to pursue principled work in conditions that prevent them from doing so – not only the material limitations of work sites, but also political obstacles to taking climate action. They develop politically expedient strategies and tactics in response to local circumstances, while using public statements and campaigns to extend their advocacy across the field. As climate advocates, they oscillate between positions as insiders and outsiders in the field, never settling in one stance from which to effect change. While they share a commitment that archives matter to climate response, complexity and contradiction hold them together as a community of advocates. Two key points of disagreement lie at the buzzing center of this community: first, whether archives are primarily resources or obstacles to climate action; and second, to what extent archival climate responses should align with or resist power relations that organize the state of the field (and the planet).
There's ample knowledge in the archives field of the significance of climate change, the environmental impacts to and of archival work, the need for archivists to respond to the crisis, and methods for responding. However, such answers make little difference in everyday change-making, if they don't also face head-on the material conditions of archival work and the political relations that determine and reproduce those conditions
Personal Digital Archiving at the Public Library
No full textPublic library programs and services increasingly bring personal digital archiving and do-it-yourself digital conversion into public spaces. What are the values and impacts of such resources? What role, if any, does public memory play in these personal practices? This poster reports on findings from interviews with District of Columbia Public Library patrons and staff about their experiences with these emerging spaces and resources
Writing the Docs Honestly
No full textPresentation at the Council of State Archivists / National Association of Government Archives & Records Administrators / Society of American Archivists 2018 Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C. Featured in a panel discussion titled, Opening the Black Box:
Transparency and Complexity in Digital Preservation, with co-panelists, Erin Baucom, Jessica Tieman, Elizabeth England, and Kyna Herzinger.In this presentation, I reflect on the centrality of documentation to digital preservation work and – drawing on work by Jennifer Douglas, Sara Ahmed, and the Write the Docs community – propose four guidelines for writing more "honest" documentation
Author response
No full textLike other intracellular fusion events, the homotypic fusion of yeast vacuoles requires a Rab GTPase, a large Rab effector complex, SNARE proteins which can form a 4-helical bundle, and the SNARE disassembly chaperones Sec17p and Sec18p. In addition to these proteins, specific vacuole lipids are required for efficient fusion in vivo and with the purified organelle. Reconstitution of vacuole fusion with all purified components reveals that high SNARE levels can mask the requirement for a complex mixture of vacuole lipids. At lower, more physiological SNARE levels, neutral lipids with small headgroups that tend to form non-bilayer structures (phosphatidylethanolamine, diacylglycerol, and ergosterol) are essential. Membranes without these three lipids can dock and complete trans -SNARE pairing but cannot rearrange their lipids for fusion
