Posted on June 24, 2011

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On 9 June 2011 it was International Archives Day - marking the day in 1948 that the International Council on Archives was founded at UNESCO in Paris. The Archival Platform was one of about 130 archives organizations that participated #AskArchivists Day on Twitter on that day, posing and answering questions about archives and archiving internationally. It followed the initiative of #AskaCurator for museums, since on September 1st 2010, over 240 curators agreed to take questions from members of the public via Twitter and the hashtag #askacurator.

Twitter is a social networking site through which people share 140 character tweets in a public forum about things that are important to them. They mark specific words with subject index hashtags (#) so that other people can follow their topic of discussion. Altogether, #AskArchivists Day generated 7232 tweets, from 1672 twitterers, and 1094 URLs were shared between them. The AP (@the_archive) sent over 60 tweets, gained more than 20 new followers (we're now at 461 followers) and had some interesting conversations.

How did other archives organisations use the platform?

On the day, the archives organizations engaged with the general public, with historians and genealogists, and with each other.

Many archives were able to promote what they had to offer:

SABC Radio Archive @SABCRadioArc writes: we have historic audio recordings of South African history > What would you like to hear again?
State Records New South Wales (@srnsw) writes: We have 67km of State archives and store approx. 500km of records in the Government Records Repository


Archives organizations also connected with each other and discussed networking strategy:

@Visarkivet writes: We're a music archive and we're curious: Which of all archives participating in #AskArchivists Day have music in their collections?
@archives_masala writes: Hi twittarchivists ! Do your institution have a social media global strategy ? What social media do you use?
@NLIreland writes: Twitter (obviously!), Facebook, Flickr, and launching blog soon.
An archive in Finland (@SLSarkiv) writes: We have been using twitter for about 8 months. It´s a great way to keep in touch with collegues and the public!
@SABCRadioArc writes: Our comp busy def social strategy. In meantime we have Facebook, Twit & blog for all depts in @SABCMediaLib.


Archive users were able to ask about collections, complain directly to the archive, ask for information or comment on the quality of the information provided by them:

@LondonHistorian writes: What's the best London archive for commercial stuff, specifically distillers, more specifically gin?
West Yorkshire Archive Service (@wyorksarchives) responds: The Nicholson's Gin collection plus other business archives are held by Hackney Archives.
@CaroleRiley writes: @naagovau How can we find out what all the codes and abbreviations mean on WWI service records?
National Archives of Australia (@naagovau) responds: list of common abbreviations in WW1/WW2 records - http://bit.ly/kqN9tk
@CaroleRiley writes: List needs to be much longer
@GenealogyGirl writes: Would like to ask archivists: Genealogists, love them or hate them?
West Yorkshire Archive Service (@wyorksarchives) responds: mostly we love them - though like any users there are those who try our patience


Archives also shared problems and information among themselves:

@kazzikat writes: we have a large number of films digitised but most not on line due to copyright restrictions.
@Arkivformidling writes: colleagues: Do you do outreach, and what's your most important reason for doing it?
@girlwithhat writes: A question that must be asked by a current LIS student: How difficult is it for a new archivist to break into the field?


Reports on the day were written by the Smithsonian and the Bodleian, as well as #askarchivists organisers.

What was its relevance to African archives and the Platform?

The responses to the questions we posed were quite interesting. There were three main issues I was interested in:

First, how to address challenges (such as cataloguing backlogs) facing South African archives: Archivists who responded to my comments and questions suggested the need for creative solutions to the problem of cataloguing backlogs for example. Perhaps digitisation and full text searches could leapfrog the problem of a cataloguing backlog and crowdsourcing this task may be possible on low budgets if well organised. The Danish State Archives (@StatensArkiver) suggested some examples of crowdsourcing digitisation projects in their archives (not online in English so difficult to find by other means).
The exchanges made me wonder whether it would not be useful to understand the balance of time and budget spent in South African archives (compared to other archives) on cataloguing versus other tasks such as responding to client queries.

The second issue I was interested in was how archives can promote wider public use of their services:

One of the questions I asked was:
The Archival Platform (@the_archive) writes: Archivists - what's the most frequent misunderstanding about your archive by visitors?
This elicited lots of responses, suggesting mainly that casual archive users were - not surprisingly - often confused about the role of the archivist and the nature of the data held in archives.
The SABC Radio Archive for example said that 'the most frequent misunderstanding [was that] we catalogue everything, which is impossible!' A number of European archives said their users often assumed that everything was (or should be) online, or that archivists could help with specific research tasks. Some archivists suggested that we 'need to get better at selling what we are and how we work to people generally!' and that archives should collaborate more with museums and libraries to increase public awareness of their various roles.

Perhaps because the public in general visits an archive far less often than a supermarket or restaurant they need clarity on the transaction required in an archive. Because archivists don't create the archive or analyse the data (except to organise it) but casual users need specific answers from that data, archivists face a lot of difficulty in explaining their role.

The last issue I was interested in was how archives can earn more income and whether they can collaborate more:
Copying fees and licensing is considered a possible revenue stream for archives but it is not easy to establish who owns these rights. But it seems that many archives do not know the copyright status of their collections.

On the copyright issues, I asked: "Do you know the copyright status of 30% of your collection or, say, 80% of your collection?" A few people answered this emphasising the difficulty of knowing the copyright status of collections. West Yorkshire Archive Service (@wyorksarchives) said for example that "we know that we don't know [copyright status] for an awful lot of it". One archives organisation commented that "Very common misunderstandings [about archives] are about IP & rights, which are especially problematic for AV materials". This is probably broadly true of many archive collections in South Africa. I suppose the question to ask is whether one takes the risk, goes ahead in an ethical way and distributes any royalties appropriately when copyright challenges arise, or plays the game so safely that the archive creates almost no income.

I was also interested in the question of collaboration and more broadly whether this can lead to greater solidarity in the face of subsidy cuts. I was looking at the tweets with interest to see how archives network among themselves and to what extent they promote each other's collections because there is unavoidable competition between archives with similar collections and a lot of an archive's identity rests with its collection. I wondered whether this might make it more difficult to network between archives except in cases where there is a large status differential or large differences between their holdings. Quite a few archives said that they tried to promote other archives through their website or advice to users; this is a good tendency. I'd be interested to know how much collaboration happens in the South African context and how this benefits archives, if at all.

So #AskArchivists Day is over, and it was memorable. It was like being at a rolling 24 hour conference lunch with lots of simultaneous chatter; sometimes difficult to follow the thread of conversation but allowing everyone to contribute in their own time. It was a perfect format for certain kinds of questions, although not for others. The long-term benefit of such initiatives probably depends on understanding what issues to raise. Perhaps on reflection it was most valuable not for the new information provided on the day (although there was some interesting material on offer) but for the reflection it generated about the bigger picture of archiving and its place in the world. It was also great for the networking and links between archives worldwide that it provided.

The Archival Platform has had a Twitter account (@the_archive) since 2009, and we've been working steadily to increase our network internationally and in South Africa through this medium. Recently, Twitter received quite a bit of coverage for its important role in current political debates in South Africa, as politicians and journalists have started using it quite intensively. Internationally, quite a few archives and museums use Twitter to communicate about and promote their work, and engage with various audiences. The Platform, together with the SABC Radio Archive (@SABCRadioArc) and the SABC Media Library (@SABCMediaLib) were the only African archives organizations participating this year. I hope next year things will be different in this respect.

Congratulations are due to Charlotte S H Jensen of the National Museum (National Museet) in Copenhagen (Denmark) & Anneke van Waarden-Koets of the Zealand Archive (Zeeuws Archief) in Middelburg (the Netherlands) who managed what turned out to be a great event on Twitter.

Note: You can see all the #AskArchivists tweets online, but you will need to increase the view limit to about 5000 and scroll down to find the substantive ones.

Harriet Deacon is the UK correspondent for the Archival Platform and manages the twitter feed for the Platform (@the_archive).

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