The Virtual Archive and National Memory:
Toward A Comparative Study of the Digital
Library Models in North American and
European Setting
Marija Dalbello
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
dalbello@scils.rutgers.edu
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~dalbello
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
European vs. American Context
________________________________________
Centralization (European)
National infrastructure within government legislation;
projects; top-down approach; involvement of governments
and ministries of culture, managing cultural heritage
•Dispersal and Consolidation within a public policy
framework (American)
Transinstitutional and cross-Institutional partnerships;
National Information Infrastructure (NII)
(Telecommunications Act of 1996); decentralized,
competitive and cooperative; grant-driven; bottom-up
approach with minimum government involvement;
evolutionary growth and selection
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Theoretical Perspectives
________________________________________
•Theory of Cultural Production
digital library’s role as cultural agency; American institutions-the sites for the production, dissemination, and
appropriation of cultural capital
•Cultural Authority
Library and the social reproduction of culture (Raber 1997)
•Memory Institutions and the Invention of Tradition
(Digital continuity, managing the record of the past)
identity shaped by memory institutions; retrospective
orientations in current digital library projects are sites for
building national identity and “invented” traditions (Fentress
& Wickham 1991; Confino 1997; Hobsbawm and Ranger
1983)
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Model for the study of digital library as cultural agency
(aspects)
1
2
3
tex
t
audience
context
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Research Questions
________________________________________
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
Institutional Contexts and Funding Patterns
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
Techniques of Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging
Memory Narrative?
Organizing Metaphors, Spatial and Temporal Markers of
Identity
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Developing A Study of Digital Library Projects
3
2
1
institutionalizatio
n
(Who?)
narrative coherence (How?)
organizing metaphors
(What?)
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
The Method: Content analysis
________________________________________
•ARL (Association of Research Libraries) Digital Initiatives
Database
Web-based registry for descriptions of digital initiatives (408
registered projects) (http://www.arl.org/did)
•Descriptions of federally funded cooperative projects
defined in the DLI (the Digital Libraries Initiative) Phase 1
and 2
•Virtual Library, ACM Special Interest Group on Information
Retrieval (SIGIR), and descriptions of projects of the
National Digital Library Federation
•Limitations of content analysis from existing sources
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Selection Criteria for Digital Library
Projects
________________________________________
•projects with "retrospective" orientation (i.e. those
presenting a view of the past)
•significant initiatives that achieved some sort of
institutionalization and may be deemed to have or will have
a significant cultural impact
•projects in the public sector
•projects that reflect a distinctly “American” approach
because they deal with cultural heritage, i.e. culture as
conceptualized in the context of national policy
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Research Questions
________________________________________
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
Institutional Contexts and Funding Patterns
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
Techniques of Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging
Memory Narrative?
Organizing Metaphors, Spatial and Temporal Markers of
Identity
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
________________________________________
Funding contexts (Saracevic & Dalbello 2001, in print):
•funding of governmental and non-governmental organizations
•funding of practical developments from similar sources
•funding from academic and public institutions
•funding for new implementations in their realm from professional and scientific
societies and subject-specific institutes
•funding from publishers to enter the new age of digital publications and access
•funding for putting their treasures in the digital domain from historical societies,
archives, and museums
•funding from collaborative contributions to provide for the common good in the
new Internet (the tradition of "free information")
•funding for knowledge organization systems in industrial settings
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
_______________________________________
Findings: Institutional contexts
•National (a: digital library initiative phase 1 and 2)
•National (b: Library of Congress, The Making of America)
•University (Special collections & Archives)
•Public libraries
•Society / subject specific Institutes
•Publishers
•Historical Societies / Archives / Museums
•Galleries, Bibliographic Utilities, Schools
•Trans-institutional, Collaborative distributed digital archives
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
_______________________________________
Findings: Institutional contexts
(355 projects in 133 institutions)
•National (a: digital library initiative phase 1 and 2)
(2)
•National (b: Library of Congress, The Making of America) (91)
•University (Special collections & Archives)
(177)
•Public libraries
(17)
•Society / subject specific Institutes
(6)
•Publishers
(2)
•Historical Societies / Archives / Museums
(29)
•Galleries, Bibliographic Utilities, Schools
(3)
•Trans-institutional, Collaborative distributed digital archives
(23)
•Other
(5)Dalbello
Copyright
LIDA 2001
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
________________________________________
Discussion
•Strong presence of frameworks defined by traditional
approaches to collection development in special collections
and archives (predetermines uses; obscurantism; static and
passive collections; digitization of materials, less
contextualization)
•Library of Congress - leadership and new approaches to
collection development in the digital environment
(contextualization, multimedia, collaborative efforts)
•From dispersal to consolidation: Increasingly focus on
collaborative efforts (1998+)
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past?
________________________________________
Conclusions
•Limited number of players; consequently, dominant models
and those receiving most funding are not the most
innovative
•Major contexts (universities’ special collections & archives
provide least innovative approaches but build strong
presence in digital libraries)
•Increasing presence of public libraries
•“Community memory” projects
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
________________________________________
Findings: information object /
representation / delivery
•Originals: images, documents (published and unpublished),
sound recordings, artifacts
•Digital Formats: primarily scanned images, but also formatted
electronic text, multimedia to lesser degree; bibliographic
information & databanks
•Delivery methods: web exhibit, limited use of databases
served on the web, retrieval via structured text
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
________________________________________
Findings: Modalities of narrative
presentation
•Topicality (narrow subject focus)
•Biographical approach to organizing historical discourse
•Event-based approach
•Commemorative
•Picaresque and episodic (pre-narrative)
•Self-reflexivity
•Focus on local history
•Localization using physical metaphors (streams, architecture,
landmarks)
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
*Narrative = ability to tell a story
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging Memory
Narrative?
________________________________________
Preliminary Findings
•Period best represented: 1860-1920
•Subject focus: Historical periods / events / people
•revolutionary war
•civil war
•African-American experience
•local history
•natural history
•history of technological inventions
•architectural styles
•musical forms
•evolution of print forms
•biography
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging
Memory Narrative?
________________________________________
Conclusions
•Simplicity of narrative presentation techniques
•Story is a picaresque voyage through linear displays
meandering around framed images of objects, figures, or
landscapes; Floating signifiers rather than signifiers eliciting
coherent readings
•Contextualization via localization, uniqueness, diversity
(Glocal? = obscurity or diversity?)
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative?
Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging
Memory Narrative?
________________________________________
Conclusions
•For all the emphasis on the retrospective content (the
historical) as noted feature of the digital library activities in
the communities of practice related to memory institutions
(archives, libraries, historical societies, museums, etc.), they
are weak in relating historical content and locked within their
existing paradigms of discrete collections
•Challenges: to make these discourses public and globally
accessible (glocal); build new ways of including viewers;
forge partnerships
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Conclusion
________________________________________
A recent evaluation of the National Digital Library Initiative at
the Library of Congress (2000), states that:
It is an impressive agglomeration of text and images but the
problem is in the delivery of narrative content. If digital
libraries springing up in various institutional contexts are as
yet unconnected masses of fragments of data and visual
information, they are obviously suffering from a lack of
purpose. As a matter of public accountability for these new
forms is to recognize whether they are accomplishing what
they proclaim.
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001
Future Research
________________________________________
•In areas of: text, audiences, and context
•Text: Expand study using the same research questions to
the “National” initiatives in Europe
•Audiences: Viewing process study audience responses;
study situated viewers, tap into interpretive strategies (how
determined by “protocols of viewing” and “horizons of
expectation”) rather than cognitive science approach
•Context: Interviews with policy makers; how do “national”
libraries’ initiatives relate to projects in the public and private
sector; funding nodes for European context
Copyright Dalbello
LIDA 2001