Archival Epistemology

From a Chronicle report on the latest Project Information Literacy Progress Report:

Ms. Head said the findings show that college students approach research as a hunt for the right answer instead of a process of evaluating different arguments and coming up with their own interpretation. “Not being aware of the diverse resources that exist or the different ways knowledge is created and shared is dangerous,” she said.

The emphasis above is mine. Next semester I’m teaching a seminar on primary sources that will include a focus on the epistemological question of how we know what we know. In The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania, 2007), Matthew Brown uses the helpful phrase “epistemology of the archive,” by which he means “a study of not only what we know from the evidential record … but also how we know what we know” (203).

Volunteers Are Waiting for Your Call

Cornell is making some progress toward funding arXiv, an open-access repository, through an NPR-style support model.

From Cultural Institution to Service

I have posted previously about the Welch Medical Library. Here is a striking statement about it, which comes from a report on the Charleston Conference:

We're a service …We're no longer an institution of cultural memory. 

Teaching Transcendence

I like refereeing to libraries and archives as transportive and transcendent places—places that enable broader experiences of time, space, and reality. I don’t usually use such language in classes, so I was surprised but satisfied to read in an evaluation of a session I taught last week (on using historical manuscripts) the comments of a student who wrote that she had learned “that there is a place [at our institution] that connects the past with the present and somehow this connection makes us feel part of something greater.”

Novel?

For a class I'm working with, I recently read James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (this link is to an interesting Google Books copy of the first edition).

Confessions is a book about a book preserved in a grave. The unearthed book consists of a pamphlet augmented by some manuscript pages. To these the published book adds an editor’s introduction, which draws from records and oral testimonies, and a conclusion, which includes the text of a letter that appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. The mixture of sources and questions about the functions of and interrelationships between each (e.g., oral accounts being influenced by circulation of the pamphlet or its memorial or allegorical contents) create a number of archival and interpretive layers that surround the story at the center of the book.

From the concluding paragraph:

Were the relation at all consistent with reason, it corresponds so minutely with traditionary facts that it could scarcely have missed to have been received as authentic; but in this day and with the present generation it will not go down …

Image: The reputed site of an 18^th-century suicide's grave, Scotland (from Wikimedia Commons).

Records 2.0

NARA considers web 2.0 and social media tools: “Are these Records?”

From “Guidance on Managing Records in Web 2.0/Social Media Platforms”:

principles for analyzing, scheduling, and managing records are based on content and are independent of the medium; where and how an agency creates, uses, or stores information does not affect how agencies identify Federal records.

Undiscoverable and in Demand

OCLC has released Taking Our Pulse, a report of its 2009 survey of archives and special collections.

The good news: “Special collections and archives are increasingly seen as elements of distinction that serve to differentiate an academic or research library from its peers.”

The bad news: “much rare and unique material remains undiscoverable [e.g., “Half of archival collections have no online presence”], and monetary resources are shrinking [“75% of general library budgets have been reduced”] at the same time that user demand [“insatiable”] is growing.”

“The top three 'most challenging issues' in managing special collections were space, born-digital materials, and digitization.” (See executive summary, 9ff.)

A webinar on the report is available here.