Joint transnational research projects using web archives?
Dear colleagues,
First I want to tell you how sorry I am for not having been present yesterday and I want to thank the organizers,
Niels Brügger and Niels Ole Finneman and the Aarhus University, which welcomes us. Niels, you asked me to
address the question of joint transnational research projects using web archives. Let me offer you some ideas in 3
points.
1/ First I want to underline to what extent RESAW can be a chance for researchers to develop joint transnational
research projects:
A structure gathering professionals of Web archives and researchers at the European level gives us a strength in
term of visibility, to make the importance of the researches on the Web archives recognize, and also gives us the
possibility to find partners to develop transnational studies in a research landscape still very scattered.
Let us be very clear: there are not so many researchers actually using the Web archives, not a real understanding
of the issues by many historians for example, a lack of formation of scholars, which also excludes that they offer
their students subjects based on these archives, because they don’t know them well. But when you look closer,
there are still uses and strengths but moving forward in a disparate row.
So one of my first proposals, already expressed during the Web sessions dedicated to the project is to realize a
mapping of the initiatives led in the various countries, the research teams which are interested in these topics and
to develop a mailing list at the European level mixing informations emanating from professional milieus and
from research communities on these questions.
This mapping would certainly show us to what extent we are ignorant of initiatives led in our own countries or
by our european neighbours and would help to develop a community of interest, which would also allow us to
imagine for example European summer schools gathering advanced researchers, students and institutions, a good
way to build the European research communities on Web archives of tomorrow.
Mapping, state of the art, mailinglists and chat forums could offer us the ability to track publications, calls, tools.
But also « classrooms training sessions », not only virtual spaces, would be interesting. This represents a real
effort, but also a benefit for both professionals as researchers, an immediate benefit but also a benefit in the
longer term.
2/ This brings me to my second point: the chance of the European level. It is a tremendous challenge on several
plans: the history of Internet and Web developments is not the same in all the countries on one hand, we meet on
the other hand language barriers and finally there is a subdivision of the spaces of consultation. Can they be
raised? If nothing is less sure and if I won’t use my time to get into the details of the legislations and obstacles,
certainly more legal than technical, which can arise to develop an European space of consultation, it seems to me
that in any case a comparative work on the conditions of access, consultation, legal rules, conditions of
reproduction and more banally even places of consultation, would be extremely useful for the researchers whose
object of study, Internet obliges, often overtake the borders
To regroup clearly these practical informations for European researchers can also give us the opportunity to
compare the various tools, the rules, and why not build others together rather than to duplicate requests and
answers. It is from the very selfish point of view of researchers a way to spread our needs, not to have to
duplicate requests of tools or help for example from institution to institution and to find correspondents and
interlocutors easily via RESAW in various European countries;
3/ Finally my third point will address a topic, which obviously means a lot to me: to lead together transnational
research projects on specific topics supplying reflexive returns, crossed exchanges, etc.
The comparison of the conditions of access, reuse, various tools in European countries should lean on a common
subject to be completely interesting and not confine itself to the arcanes of the archiving. Several topics seem to
me here stimulating:
- We can imagine to study historically an event which would reproduce in the time and which could besides
reproduce in the future: indeed it would allow us to think about conditions of preservation, constitution of files
that could show the needs and limit that the researchers would find in the previous archiving and it could
constitute a work in progress also allowing to develop specific tools. European elections had been evoked: it is
an extremely interesting topic. But it implies however for an intelligent and comprehensive reading a strong
political background, and it would be necessary to see if it is enough represented in our research teams and how
otherwise we can integrate more specialists of the question. The Olympic Games that were evoked are also a
stimulating theme: Besides their regularity in the time it is an event which summons a diversity of sites,
introduces media arenas and raises the question of the crossmedia, the participation of Internet users, etc. I shall
also propose a more modest European event: the Eurovision, completely European and an event which would
allow to adapt year by year a number of tools.
2nd point: a transverse topic not in term of events but websites, for example the evolution of the museums
websites since the middle of the 1990s: How do these websites evolved? What obstacles may I meet for my
study? Do my European neighbours meet the same difficulties and if not for which reasons? If yes, how do we
raise them? Etc.
Here as in the last case, we absolutely need to think on a share research and evaluation grid.
- Finally a work on Websites has also to lean on knowledges of the Web history, its uses, its evolutions and its
users. It is a tremendous work, but essential. Timeline, virtual exhibitions based on the Web archives, interviews
of researchers, actors and archivists, to redraw the history of Web would supply here an excellent project to face
the problems of reproducibility, access, and would help researchers who are not Webhistorians, but can study the
Web archives for their topics without competences of the history of Web, to find some easily.
And certainly there are many other tracks to which you are going to draw my attention …