Digital Archiving 1.0 – MPLP
In archive literature, Archives 1.0 is described as a closed approach with archives available to a limited number of patrons, mainly researchers interested in its holdings. Also, during this phase, archiving shifted from digitizing all material and then making it available to patrons, to digitizing as much as possible as fast as possible and making it available incrementally to patrons. With limited funding and staffing, archives were always trying to practice the concept of “More Product, Less Process (MPLP)” – posited by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner’s in their American Archivist article on revamping the archival process.
Basically, the idea is to get as much online for the digital archive by simplifying the workflow. I remember practicing this in a digital archive I was managing at the time. I simplified the digital workflow for my staff and volunteers to get as many photos digitized and tagged onto the website. We aimed for at least 5% per week of a 200K photo collection. Over time, the ratio of material available as digital vs. analog would flip so that more was available online for researchers. Instead of waiting to socialize the new collection after all of the digitizing was done, I advertised the collection from the beginning. This attracted researchers who would then ask to see other photos that had not been digitized yet. We would either have them wait or in some cases, they were invited to visit the archive to view photos which was even better.
Along these lines, more and more “mobile digitization labs” are popping up which involve setting up multiple scanners and laptops to brute force fast digitization of materials to get a collection online as soon as possible.
Digital Archiving 2.0 – Socializing Archives
The emphasis for Archives 2.0 is on socializing the archive as a community by using Web 2.0 tools like social media. A friend of mine invited me to apply for a job as a Digital Archivist upon her exit. As she left the job, the title turned into Community Outreach Archivist as the job focus shifted to using social media such as Twitter and Facebook to build a community around the archives holdings.
From the digital archiving lenses, one form of “social archiving” involves crowdsourcing metadata for digital archive content and soliciting volunteers through efforts such as the Citizens Archivist Dashboard run by the National Archives. In these times, volunteer archiving programs at state archives and other organizations are only a Google search away.
Digital Archiving 3.0 – Big Data and AI
In the time of Archives 3.0, large digital archives are considered digital repositories with massive amounts of metadata. For instance, I once worked on digitizing a collection of 400K photos. For each photo, we captured about 15 metadata fields. Multiplying that by the 400K, there are 6 million metadata objects captured for this collection. So considering this point, the metadata about the content of the digital archive itself is a wealth of information about the subject matter of the archive.
To me, we are well into an exciting trend of using big data and AI-based tools and techniques to process the metadata residing in large digital repositories. A field has emerged called Computational Archival Science (CAS) and was defined in a special issue of the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage, https://dl.acm.org/journal/jocch/archivalscience. This exciting, promising field of digital archiving uses AI-based and introducing data science techniques to gain insights from the metadata contained in large digital repositories. so, it is the marriage between archiving, computing and data science. Nirvana for many archivists who are data and technology-inclined.
HEATH Information 