What’s in a Digital Archive?
Kayla Hickson-Grant reflects on her experience working in the field of digital archives.
We were very lucky to have Kayla Hinkson-Grant intern for the Connecticut Digital Archive in the summer of 2020. Kayla is a member of the class of 2021 at Mount Holyoke College and a resident of Fairfield, CT. Over the summer Kayla worked on a number of projects focused on collections and object available in the CTDA. As part of her internship, Kayla was interested in the ideas representation and power in digital collections and the field of archives in general.
As a result of her work, she has written a number of posts for CTDA Connect. Below is her second entry, a reflection on content beyond images in digital archives, new forms of digital content, and breaking down barriers to access archival content, both digital and physical.
When people think of archives a frequent first thought is a “place for old pictures” but they are much more than that, this is especially true for digital archives. This is probably because photos are one of the most accessible formats of an object to preserve, which is also easily uploaded to a digital repository like the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA). Other objects have more complex and expensive preservation and digitization processes. This reality puts limitations on what is digitized and when. Although the CTDA has about 1.7 million objects, each collection in the repository is a fraction of the complete collections of each of our community members.
CTDA community members have the flexibility to input objects and collections at their own pace and discretion based on their respective resources and bandwidth. Works of art can be found in the CTDA that are more than the stereotypical photo. Beyond the image of the art itself, photographic collections can contain artist interviews, oral history related to the work, recordings of performance art, images of physical art and much more. The arts are an expression of the artist identity, communities they belong to, the context of cultural climate, and an expression of the times.
Digital archives are unique in that they can document and preserve the past and currently lived history and experiences.
The arts have always been underrated and overlooked even in the world of archives. Art collection objects have the same value as property records and official meeting minutes, all of which can be found in the CTDA. Some art collections currently in the CTDA are the We Are Artists Everyone Exhibit and the Julius Hartt Collection. The Connecticut Historical Society (CHS) has two distinctive collections that are more than the old pictures: the CHS General Manuscript Collections and Amateur Films. Digital archives are unique in that they can document and preserve the past and currently lived history and experiences.
The development of smartphones and social media has shaped a new branch of digital archives equivalent to personal traditional archives. Software development projects and collaborative initiatives, such as DocNow and the Wayback Machine, geared towards preserving websites and digital-born content from social media. For example, Twitter archives all past tweets made from an account and Facebook timelines preserve and remind us of thoughts, photos, and memories we shared online. Likewise, in Snapchat conversations, anyone within the chat can select to save and/or unsave messages immediately or for an unlimited time after the fact and memories groups every photo or video taken within the app. Instagram stories, spotlights, lives, and IGTV allow you to share posts temporarily or permanently. During the global human rights uprisings throughout the pandemic, people have created and shared preexisting knowledge on Tik Tok, most of which are intentionally left out of whitewashed history books and curriculum. When users or creators choose to make content or publish materials on their pages/accounts they assign a status of relevance to the content.
You can identify barriers to archival materials and evaluate why they are there and if they truly necessary.
Personal digital archives on social media meet the objectives of creating community and being more accessible. Most Tik Tok videos are closed captioned, the ability to like and comment across platforms allow for people to create a collective imagined identity, connection, and relationships within communities. There are few security barriers and physical barriers beyond access to the internet and a compatible device to digital archives. Most do not require expensive and possibly inaccessible identification such as official governmental identification. In many traditional archives, an additional physical barrier is a wall between where the user interacts with material and where the objects are stored. Often materials have to be requested than gathered by the archivist followed by surveillance use in reading rooms and material sign-out sheets that potentially violate the users’ privacy. You can identify barriers to archival materials and evaluate why they are there and if they are truly necessary. Review and update your accessibility and security policies and documents like registration forms that can be barriers and connected to racist and classist laws around identification.
Within modern personal digital archives, content is used to hold individuals, groups, and governments accountable. There are a plethora of videos recorded on smartphones or body cameras of police brutality in the past ten years. Especially in the past few months with a significant spike in response to the various peaceful protest and riots for equitable human rights in support of Black Lives Matter and justice for murdered black people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Oluwatoyin Salau, Brayla Stone and countless others. These videos, archived tweets, and other types of posts, have been essential in police investigations and can be used as evidence in court. Traditional physical archives have the same potential to hold the creator of objects, themselves, their governments, and communities accountable. One thing you can do is reevaluate your administrative and collection policies to make sure that you are collecting representational materials of local communities. You should also ask yourself, why you said yes to accession one collection, and what made you say no to the other? Be detailed, diligent, and transparent when discussing what parts of the collection will be publicly accessible or not.
The CTDA guides each new community members in exploring these questions during the onboarding process. As part of a larger project to be launched soon, the CTDA is actively collecting resources about the biases and inequities within the collections of cultural heritage and memory institutions. The aim of the program will be to help educate community members about how to hold each other accountable and implement purposeful and inclusive best practices.
Read other articles and reflections by Kayla published on CTDA Connect:
Connecticut Digital Archive Connect is the publication of the Connecticut Digital Archive, a program of the UConn Library. Visit https://ctdigitalarchive.org to learn more.
