Today’s archival collections are growing in size and richness, but falling short of attention and
funding to match. The biggest trend among archives and collections today is a push towards
digitization of all archival materials for online access through a database and browser interface.
This allows the broadest reach to share information across the world. This progression of open
access is limited however to physical interactions with a keyboard, mouse and screen based
interface.
Digitization of original objects alone has this liability of losing serendipity, tactility and
comprehensibility. Current metadata protocols tend to ignore more physical characteristics of
archival materials like texture, weight, size, materials used, or even sensory metadata like smell.
Without an informed archivist present the background knowledge and context can be lost as
well. The rich contextual knowledge they hold of the collections they process and keep is as
valuable as the objects themselves. How can we capture the above and access all of it in more
tangible ways?
The current model of access to digitized collections has the archive meeting the user online
through a database and browser point-and-click interface. An alternative future model of access
could have all digitized collections pushed to one "archive cloud" where new physical interfaces
can pull from. The prototypes I've designed look to bridge these two models or paradigms of
access and the movements from one to the other.
Many museums use a wunderkammer presentation model when exhibiting collections.
Affordances of such exhibits limits the audience to physical location as well as limited
relationships between displayed objects. A question I asked was what type of interfaces could
be designed curate a digitized collection on-the-fly? Virtual curation on-the-fly and serendipity in
search are two things you can’t experience now at archives.
I’m extending this by designing for a future system with explorative interfaces to access many
collections simultaneously. These interfaces act as entry points to address four key issues.
Bridging multiple disparate collections; Closed vs open collections; Qualifications which includes
things like location, status, credentials, and research intent.
Research
Contemporary perspectives on knowledge development; Curation of disparate collections with
relating objects; Makes it easier to excavate sideways culturally instead of just going deep on
one topic.
Interface
Virtual info with physical place is helpful; Scale of digitized objects can’t necessarily best fit in an
all-in-one interface; Physical objects with virtual digitized data.
Role of the Archivist
Much knowledge can be stored in metadata, but even greater contextual knowledge is retained
by the archivist. They know their collections. They know what they have AND what is missing;
The experience of researching and accessing objects can be altered by a anecdote or
information shared by the archivist.
My project corrects for this case of straight up digitization towards database-structured searches
by having all digitized collections pushed to an “archive cloud.” A user can interact with disparate
collections regardless of location, status, credentials or research intent.
