I am happy to share with you my research paper, that studies the "Digital Archives on the web, and digital archives services". This project was conducted in the "Digital services in archives and research repository" course lectured by Dr Farah Sbeity at the Lebanese University Faculty of Information
2. Outline
Introduction Archives Definition Digital Archives
Digital transformation difficulties
Information Systems
Objectives
British National Archive
Born Digital Archives
Definition
AI tool
Consortium
Human resources
Conclusion References
3. The progress of digital technologies has alerted
the way in which information is created, stored,
accessed and used.
This has led to a shift towards digital archives,
which have become increasingly important as a
mean to preserve cultural heritage and scientific
knowledge.
Introduction
4. Archives are a resources used by historian researchers, to discover
hidden truth in the past.
Representation of history.
It functions as a matrix
What is an Archives?
5. What is an Archives?
Archival documents, like any other sources, present the experiences of individuals
whose actions, both surprising and bleak, intersected with the various forms of
authority.
Greet-Jan van Bussel mentions in reference to Arlette Farge in his article that:
“The experience of engaging the archives, of bringing to light knowledge embedded in
old documents and scraps of parchment and paper, knowledge that would otherwise
have remained unknown and, possibly, forgotten.”
6. Digital Archives
In our digital world, we are forced to merge our
organization, life, and government data to
synchronize with the technological progress.
Due to that digital repository and archives were
born.
8. Information system
In an organization the IS (information system) helps
creates the digital archive. There are rules and policies
set by the organization that help set regulations related
to the preservation of the documents, which to be kept
and which to be weeded.
9. Organisation Archives Objectives
1. keeping value of their organization
2. Reconstructing the past
3. Providing evidence of events
4. Producing meaning
10. British National Archive
National archives, like the British National Archive, are also
being digitalized. many questions has been answered about
the main difficulties they faced during different phase of
digitalization and lunching process.
By digitizing their collections, they played a crucial role in
supporting historical research and analysis. The information
they have catalogued and made digitally accessible, including
items that have been digitized, allows researchers to easily
search and access relevant material.
11. In this way, the National archive is providing the
necessary evidence to storytelling and
contributing to the public value of the archives.
12. Born Digital Archives
Open access to digital-born archives, concern galleries, libraries,
archives and museums (GLAMs), it’s difficult to find a solution to
open access, with that being said we find a lot of “Dark Archives” on
the web inaccessible by the audience of the GLAM.
13. What is a Born Digital Archives ?
Archives e-born materials
In comparison with digitalized archives, born-digital archives
don’t rely on paper and old formats. But digital assets, could be
memes, Gifs, emails, videos, images, 3-D Models… those assets
are growing by quantity and quality. Born-digital materials could
be reproduced easily and without extra cost.
Born-digital archives are diverse, we have to use an analytical
approach to understand their needs. They are a part of a huge
ecosystem that is constantly stretching .
14. AI Use as problem solving tool
Working with digital humanities, and computer
scientists, software was created with the assistance of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) to give access to Dark
archives.
That being said, the AI software can differentiate
between sensitive and none sensitive records and can
give access to the latter. Examples of software in use:
AURA, AEOLIAN and ePADD
15. AI weakness
AI can make many mistakes, for instance, when the British
library used ePADD while the AI software under the category
of drugs categorized working on the digitalization of Wendy
Cope’s (Poet) email archive, the word “Mushroom” in her
shopping list referring to the vegetable. Thus leading to false
positives
16. Consortium
as a solution to open access
Consortiums are very important to be used to grant access to users, Hence:
“Users would either be able to log in to the central consortium system as guests
or as members of partner institutions. Guests would have the opportunity to:
· search across the entire collection;
· read, view and download content that is “full view”;
· search within content that is “limited access”;
· Access content that does not have restrictions, such as works available on
the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine which contains 475 billion web pages
and other born-digital content.” (Lise Jaillant, 2022)
17. Human Resources
The role of archivist is still essential even with born-digital
archives. Because systems still need humans to arrange, classify and
monitor the information. It needs critical decisions to be made.
Moreover, the archivist is the main player of the game
18. Conclusion
The digitalization of archives is necessary.
While AI is helping with the process of digitalization, there is an
important role being played by people writing the source code of
the algorithms, and people who are working on the new software.
Decision-making skills are needed in selecting, sorting,
cataloguing, indexing and weeding records.