The Virtual Archive and National Memory:

1. 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

2. ________________________________________ • 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 an accepted public policy framework (American) • Transinstitutional and Cross-Institutional Partnerships; public 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

3. ________________________________________ • 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 1998; Harris vs. Shera) • 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)

4. Model for the study of digital library as cultural agency (aspects) text 1 audience 2 context 3

5. ________________________________________ 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

6. Developing A Study of Digital Library Projects 3 Institutionalization (Who?) 2 1 narrative coherence (How?) organizing metaphors (What?)

7. ________________________________________ • 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

8. ________________________________________ • Criteria for Selection of Digital Library Projects for analysis: • projects with "retrospective" orientation (i.e. deal with cultural heritage) • significant initiatives that have 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 may reflect a distinctly “American” approach because they deal with cultural heritage, i.e. culture as conceptualized in the context of a national policy

9. 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

10. Who is Involved in Creating the Record of the Past? • _______________________________________ • Findings (institutional contexts) • National type 1(digital library initiative phase 1 and 2) • National type 2 (Library of Congress, The Making of America) • University (Special collections & Archives) • Public libraries • Society / subject specific Institutes • Publishers • Historical Societies / Archives / Museums • Transinstitutional, Collaborative distributed digital archives • Institutionally unattached • Various combinations thereof

11. 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+)

12. 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 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

13. Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative? • ________________________________________ • Findings: modalities of narrative presentation • Topicality • Biographical approach to organizing historical discourse • Event-based approach • Commemorative • picaresque and episodic (non-narrative) • Self-reflexivity • Focus on local history • Localization using physical metaphor • Emphasis on invented traditions (the “famous firsts”) • Glocal? (obscurity or diversity?)

14. Information Maze or Coherent Historical Narrative? • ________________________________________ • Discussion • Simplicity of narrative presentation techniques • Story is a picaresque voyage through linear displays meandering around framed images of objects, figures, or landscapes • Contextualization via localization, uniqueness, diversity • Social position of collections, objects, and narratives is unclear • Floating signifiers rather than signifiers eliciting coherent readings • But, texts with strong Performative aspects • Are these collections building “restricted” codes or contributing to “elaborate” ones? (cf. Basil Bernstein’s distinction of “restricted”/”elaborate” code)

15. Information Maze or Coherent Historical 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 • Challenges: to make these discourses public and globally accessible • Take advantage of “performative” potential to build new ways of including viewers

16. Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging Memory Narrative? • ________________________________________ • Preliminary Findings • Period bestrepresented: 1860-1920 • Subject focus: revolutionary war, civil war, african-american experience, local history; natural history; history of technological inventions; architectural styles; musical forms; evolution of print forms • 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 • Delivery methods: web exhibit, limited use of databases served on the web

17. Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging Memory Narrative? ________________________________________ • Discussion • Contextualization techniques limited to integration with print source for access to data agglomeration, or integration with supporting reference collections • Consolidation of genres and formats from multiple collections is limited to the Library of Congress

18. Repositories of Fragmented Record or Emerging Memory Narrative? ________________________________________ Conclusion A recent evaluation of the National Digital Library Initiative at the Library of Congress (2000), states that NDLI 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.

19. ________________________________________ • 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; identify funding nodes for european context