Share this:

Click on the #caara link in tweet below to show tweets to date.

Tweets from NAA/CAARA residential Archives 2.0 – interacting with the future
University House ANU 8-12 Nov 2010 http://bit.ly/afS8Rr #caara—
Bradley Headland (@bradheadland) November 18, 2010

Share this:

I was invited by the Danish Archive, Copenhagen, organisers of #followanarchive, to write this post on the official blog.
Brad

Share this:

Linda and I just provided our work section an overview of the content of the NAA/CAARA Residential.  We used our own blog ( http://tpdev.wordpress.com/ ) to share it – feel free to use this in whatever way you’d like! Mark

Share this:

Official photo of NAA/CAARA residential delegates

Pia Waugh, ICT Policy Advisor, Office of Senator Kate Lundy

Ross Gibbs, Director-General, National Archives of Australia

Senator The Hon. Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Citizenship, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Ministers, Senator for the ACT

Dr. Nicholas Gruen, CEO Lateral Economics and Chair of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce

Professor John McMillan, Australian Information Commissioner, Prime Minister and Cabinet

Conference delegates

Share this:

University House, Australian National University

NAA/CAARA residential delegates studying

The Scarthe dinning room

Enjoying dinner in the Scathe dinning room

Dagmar Parer, Director of Studies, National Archives of Australia being presented with thank you gifts by Niles Elvery, Manager, Public Access, Queensland State Archives

Share this:

Highlights from Day 5

After a jam packed last four days it was a bit of a shock to discover that it was actually Friday and the last day of the residential. Still that didn’t mean we were taking it easy!

The were three main themes up for discussion on the final day:

What is an Archives 2.0?

How do you re-engineer to be an Archives 2.0?

What are the implications?

However, before we got started there was a shoutout to #followanarchive day ( http://twitter.com/search#search?q=%23followanarchive ) as well as the news that @naagovau ( http://twitter.com/naagovau ) had arrived on Twitter!  Lucky we set up those Twitter accounts last night. Delegates were given the OK to tweet during the day(but keep listening).

Becoming an Archives 2.0

Dagmar Parer

Dagmar began the official part of the program with a presentation and discussion about the social web and the importance of an organisations culture. The key point underpinning the session was that adapting to the social web is as much about internal change for an organisation as it is external communication.  An organisation can’t effectively adapt to the social web unless the internal factors are addressed.

The characteristics of the social web such as building collaborative relationships, transparency and crowdsourcing are a challenge for an organisation with a culture that focuses on control. “For most organisations adopting the social web means changing their mindset about why they exist and how they operate.”

We then broke up into groups to discuss the values of the social web (Trust, flexibility, transparency……) and how our organisations would change if they embraced these values. Everyone must have been engrossed because the pastries arrived for morning tea and no one moved.

Adrian Cunningham

Adrian picked up the session where Dagmar left off and initiated a discussion about cultural change; how to precipitate it and how to be an agent for change (while still retaining your sanity!) One text mentioned during the discussion was The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (ISBN 0-316-31696-2) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point ).

We then looked at three model types for organisations, 1.organic 2. centralised and 3. co-ordinated; and discussed which model was best suited to the needs of social media.

After this the session segued into a look at the declaration of Open Government ( http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/strategy-and-governance/gov2/declaration-of-open-government.html ) and the challenges it presented for Government 1.0 .  The work of Thomas Jane Connors on the Information Policy of the government of President George W. Bush ( http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2002/JA/Feat/Conn.htm ) was suggested for further reading.

Dagmar Parer

After lunch Dagmar led the group onto the web to lookup:

Peoples Archive

Citizens Archive

Interactive User Community

Participatory archives

Participatory archive

Traditional archives

We had a discussion about the sites we were finding and their relevance (some very, some not at all) before moving on to look at the differences between a participatory archive and a participatory archives (Note: Participatory is a very tricky word to say after lunch on a Friday afternoon).

It was pointed out that in the literature there were differences between which definition applied to participatory archive (with an e) and which definition applied to participatory archives (with an s) (E.g. See the work of Ista Huvilo ( http://www.istohuvila.fi/participatory-archive-towards-decentralised-curation-radical-user-orientation-and-broader ) and Joy Palmer ( http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/palmer/ ). As a group we boldly agreed to sit on the fence.

Roughly speaking the two definitions are:

1. an online repository which users are invited to contribute to and
2. a vision for a post modern archive where all are equal in the presence of the record and in which users are active in all processes. It asks us to view all processes in a radically expanded version of uses.

Dagmar noted that definition no 2. was the type of model suitable for a government archive working towards Archives 2.0 .

A Fond Farewell

The group made a presentation to Dagmar Parer, Director of Studies, Emma Buckley, Residential Co-ordinator as well as Wendy and Russell (in absentia) to thank them for all their efforts over the past 5 days. Not only did they offer us a fantastic program that was the envy of many of the speakers attending, they looked after all 23 of us and made the whole experience a positive and empowering one. No mean feat in a seminar with 12 hour days. Thank you!

Where to next?

But wait there’s more.  The group has agreed to keep working on the business case/blueprint through the blog and to keep collaborating on Archives 2.0. Watch this space! (Which comes complete with handy RSS feed.)

Share this:

All the residential delegates would like to congratulate and sincerely thank Dagmar Parer, Director of Studies, National Archives of Australia and Emma Buckley, Residential co-ordinator, National Archives of Australia for all their hard work in setting up and running a brilliant week of learning and sharing.

Share this:

Broad Topic – Information Management
Strategy – Discussion Day
Effect – stimulating, challenging, encouraging and a little bit scary

Barbara Reed – Director, Recordkeeping Innovation Pty. Ltd
Managing and preserving Web 2.0 information

Barbara provided us with a case study where a member of the public dealing with government agencies used a number of Internet (some Web 2.0) applications to seek information e.g. YouTube; government websites and search tools; Facebook. The government data she located was reused and mashed up with other data sets to construct her own publication. What are the recordkeeping implications?

Barbara talked and walked and invited discussion about the implications. She challenged present information management practice for the management of information in the Web2.0 world. She suggested that to manage records in this environment models need to be more embracive.

Barbara reiterated the need for persistent identifiers and the value of annotating records with good metadata as they are created. She questioned how much monitoring we should be doing if we are working in an engagement model where if “it’s open, it’s open’. The status quo and traditional role of an archive institution was also questioned.

She highlighted the use of BIG data and little apps i.e. little apps to find and extract information from BIG data.

Cassie Findlay – Senior Project Officer, Government Recordkeeping, State Records Authority of NSW
Christine Johnston – Director Agency Relations, NAA

Panel discussion: Records management solutions in a Web 2.0 environment

Cassie mentioned that with records management in the Web 2.0 environment there needs to be a move away from end product collection based archiving to another form. Cassie provided us with a current example of capturing digital records of an outgoing Premier who was actively Web 2.0 engaged. Data needed to be extracted from proprietary applications e.g. YouTube and Twitter and accessioned and stored as digital records. This certainly raised issues of administrative change.

Cassie encouraged us to play and learn how Web 2.0 applications work as this will add value to our own recordkeeping strategies; recordkeeping advice and risk management. We need to ensure that digital records are meaningful and trustworthy. See how State Records have tackled this with their Future Proof Strategy.
http://futureproof.records.nsw.gov.au/
Also while there look at the interesting results from a survey conducted with ICT professionals regarding recordkeeping.

Christine reinforced that agencies are responsible for documenting their business and it doesn’t really matter where that is. However it’s challenging capturing government business records when they created in a Web 2.0 environment.  Loss of control could make us feel vulnerable.

One issue that Christine raised that had most of us nodding was the fact that in
our workplaces we don’t have access to many of the social networking tools to enable engagement in this sphere. And that this makes it difficult to frame advice without access to these tools.

See Social media: Another type of Commonwealth record http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/create-capture-describe/socialmedia/index.aspx

In the robust and lively discussion it was mentioned that Government agencies want to do the right thing regarding recordkeeping in this area but want more “how to” information as well as principles, policies and procedures.

Adrian Cunningham – Director, Strategic Relations and Personal Records, NAA.
Reflections on how Gov 2.0 objectives pertain to ‘Archives 2.0’

Adrian was a member of the Gov 2.0 taskforce and was able to provide us with an insider’s view of some of the processes involved in getting to report stage. He reflected on Gov 2.0 and how it relates to Archives 2.0.

The taskforce had to work in a 6 months’ time frame and used Web 2.0 tools to communicate with taskforce members and to have online engagement with the public. This input did inform discussion and decision making and raised interesting recordkeeping challenges regarding this Public Sector Information (PSI).

See the report – Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0
http://gov2.net.au/report/
Key recommendations pertaining to Archives are:

#7 Copyright issues
#6 Make PSI open, accessible and reusable
#8 Information publication scheme
#2 “definition of a Commonwealth Record”

Adrian explained that Archives have a lot to gain as:
For instance we have records -in- waiting for liberation – see Liberating Heritage Collections
http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/09/11/liberating-heritage-collections
Also see:
Capturing and preserving authentic and accessible evidence of Government 2.0
http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/09/14/capturing-and-preserving-authentic-and-accessible-evidence-of-government-2-0-part-two/

As a final thought Adrian posed the question: Is Jenkinson’s ‘physical and moral defence of the record’ still a valid archival mission?
One clever response was:
This would be termed Jenkinsonian 2.0
And a response
or Neo Jenkinsonian

Adrian also spoke about:
ICA/ADRI Principles and Functional Requirements for Records in Electronic Office Environments
http://www.ica.org/en/2008/02/26/principles-and-functional-requirements-records-electronic-office-environments-call-com

He focused on Module 3: Business Systems
The main audience for this are business systems developers who can include recordkeeping functionality in their designs.

Evening Session
Twitter
In the evening session we set up Twitter accounts so that we have the opportunity to participate in followanarchive as November 12 is Follow an Archive day on Twitter. This will give us an opportunity to participate in a like-minded Twitter community.
http://www.followanarchive.blogspot.com/

Archives 2.0 Project
Each table wrote a paragraph describing what is meant by Archives 2.0. In achieving consensus on the content of the paragraph, there was a noisy buzz in the room with everyone employing their research skills and reflections about the content of the last few days.

Share this:

Rose Holley, Manager of Trove, National Library of Australia
Crowdsourcing Strategies

Rose spoke about the opportunities for archives in crowdsourcing. We can engage users in many of our big goals, goals for which we don’t have resources such as massively transcribing, describing, correcting, or digitising our holdings. In fact, the bigger and more seemingly impossible the goal, the more likely it is that you will capture the imagination of the online community.

The NLA’s Australian Newspaper Project is a great example of crowdsourcing. In just the first year of its operation their visitors corrected over 7 million lines of OCR’d text.

Rose described the motivations of their users and the NLA’s experiments in enhancing that motivation. Most visitors do it for fun and you can enhance that experience by showing project progress, by having clear goals, by acknowledging contributions, and even by using ranking tables to spark competition.

Sebastian Chan, A/G Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies, Powerhouse Museum
How organisations employ Web 2 technologies

Sebastian urged us to focus on the context of engagement, rather than fixate on particular technologies. Great design is important for Web 2 interfaces.

Sebastian offered these guiding design principles:

• findable (where users look)
• meaningful (can be understood)
• responsive
• usable/ shareable
• available online, onsite and in the communities of creation

Users give us their time and attention. We must value and respect that resource.

Sebastian described the linkages that happen online, giving an example of a Spanish comb in the Powerhouse collection that users have linked to a newspaper article on the NLA’s Australian Newspapers site that explains the context of that object’s accessioning.

The Powerhouse is working on ways to make such linkages seamless through initiatives such as their recent publication of a collection API. Only weeks old, this API has made their collection discoverable in other online contexts such as through the NLA’s Trove tool and the Digital NZ network.

Ben Searle, General Manager, Australian Government Office of Spatial Data Management
Making public sector information available and the barriers to its release

There are obstacles in the way of e-Gov and Archives 2.0.

Technical challenges include the fact that most government data has been created to support internal business systems and business proceses. It is not structured for public consumption. Agencies aren’t resourced to create data in publishable form. Data needs accurate metadata in order to remain authentic and reliable.

Spatial data is collected as a data set and so is relatively easy to publish, as opposed to business data. But even when the technical capacity is there, there are cultural challenges that create inertia and impede the opening up of information. Ben described how issues of privacy, control, monetization of IP often aren’t so frightening when you scratch their surface.

Dr Tim Sherratt
Mapping Our Anzacs Project and Beyond

Tim blew our minds with a sprawling, challenging, and inspiring presentation that went well over length but left us all wanting more. Rather than attempt to reduce it to a few points, which won’t do it justice, here is Tim’s talk in full:

http://www.slideshare.net/wragge/the-four-es-doing-more-with-metadata

Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Law Faculty, Queensland University of Technology
Copyright Law and intellectual property in a Gov 2.0 environment

Professor Fitzgerald introduced the early groundwork that laid the foundations for Gov 2.0 and the central role played by the academics and lawyers who have been advocating for open licensing of public sector information for many years. Professor Fitzgerald made the point that some of these principles derive from the 19C when English lawmakers introduced Crown Copyright with the expectation that some government information should rightfully be free.

There is a balance that we should aim to reach between openness and control. Some control is necessary in order to maintain attribution and in order to clarify and respect rights to information. Professor Fitzgerald made a strong case for the use of creative commons licenses as a way of avoiding the ‘no rights’ wilderness of the public domain, but still ensuring access to public sector information.

Share this:

First, it was great for a 2nd day to meet and chat with archivists from Australian State and National archives and from NZ. 

Second, Pia Waugh’s rapid fire hints and tricks for engaging and maintaining online communities – what she calls keeping up your google juice!  As IT Policy Adviser to Senator Kate Lundy she has to manage heavy online traffic and it just goes to show how important Web 2.0 can be to politicians. Some of Pia’s tips were: go for modular tools that can readily engage with others; use open standards products; do everything possible to make yourself discoverable – links, urls, twitter etc; develop goodwill by a willingness to engage, and identify champions who will spread the word and help you value add. 

Third, Dr Silvia Pfeiffer’s talk on video and how practical it can be for cultural institutions to get film out on popular video sites such as you tube with their ready made solutions and large audience potential.  And how online communities can enhance engagement including adding search tags and providing translations of foreign films. Also, the point that video often has its own distinct online community that will only be reached via video sites. She also discussed new developments including integrated captioning and audio inscriptions for visually impaired users.  She has called for a whole of government platform for video which she called gov tube. 

Finally, the residential project really got going in the evening session, thanks I think, to some great behind the scenes thinking and hard work by National Archives coordinators.  Each group was able to get stuck into an aspect of archives and how it should be out there in the web 2.0 world.  My group’s ideas included blogs about what records should be kept (web 2.0 appraisal policy) and what records should be put online (web 2.0 arrangement & description/access policy).  Also, it was announced that details of the project and ongoing project work will be posted to this blog.  This means everyone can add their input , so please help us build our business case for Archives 2.0.