Open practice as personal: an archivist’s perspective
When starting the Open Knowledge in Higher Education course, I brought with me some assumptions about open practice that I’ve absorbed during my career as a professional archivist working in university special collections libraries. In higher education, I’d observed the evolution of open practice over recent years with interest. The development of open educational resources such as MOOCs and free online courses, and the moves towards open research and open data which can be seen through the growth of open access journals and research repositories to enable data reuse shows how open practice has been growing within the sector.
As for archives, they have historically been seen as somewhat rarefied and closed to those not perceived to have the correct credentials for access, but in recent years here too there has been a growing awareness and adoption of a culture of openness and widening access. Archives Service Accreditation, the UK’s standard for defining best practice and standards in archives services positions the experiences of stakeholders in accessing material as a key component of the standard, and services are required to show understanding of the access requirements of various user groups, both physically and remotely. Online platforms and tools such as blogs and social media, as well as more traditional digitisation programmes, have been embraced as ways by which access to items can be provided to audiences outside the usual academic user base — audiences previously excluded such as life-long learners, family historians, school pupils and marginalised demographic groups are being welcomed in this more open culture.
Many university special collections departments have shown the desire to embrace open values when digitising material and putting it online. For example, at the University of Manchester digitised Special Collections material is made available via a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 4.0) wherever possible. However, there are barriers to this approach which mean it may not always be possible to make digitised material freely available under open licenses. Digitisation is expensive and some organisations find it necessary to enter into commercial partnerships to pay for the process, which can result in material being hosted behind paywalls. While this does make material much more openly available than it otherwise would be, it cannot be considered open. Another significant barrier is copyright and intellectual property rights and the need to locate and gain permission from copyright holders. The laws around orphan works (items for which copyright holders are unknown or cannot be located) are not designed with the digitisation of historical material in mind which restrict what can and cannot be put online. Nevertheless, to me, it seemed very simple — whilst pragmatic decisions relating to economic, technical and legal factors are unavoidable and need to be taken into consideration, wherever possible, material should be made available in as openly a fashion as possible, but ideally free of charge and under an open license.
Therefore, it was interesting to be faced with perspectives that challenged my thinking right from the off! Far from seeing the barriers of open access in purely practical terms, as I had done, Catherine Cronin writes about about ‘engaging with the complexity and contextuality of openness’ and recognises that there is a social dimension to open practice in addition to the economic, political and technical aspects which are more commonly recognised. She also highlights the idea that ‘open practice is always personal’. Sava Singh has also written about the personal nature of open practice, recognising that when we partake in the commonly recognised concepts of open (open access, open source, open data and open content), we’re also expected to be open (my emphasis). She also discusses how openness tends to benefit those in privileged positions and come with risks for marginalised scholars, highlighting how openness intertwines with identity.
The ideas of open practice as always having a personal dimension had simply never occurred to me before reading Cronin’s and Singh’s pieces, but I found this, and the connection between openness and identity as fascinating to consider within the context of archives. Archives aren’t neutral objects — they encompass the ideas, thoughts, feelings and beliefs of their creators, and they provoke emotional and affective responses in their users. They are intrinsically personal. This sense of the personal is integral to the collection and curation of archives too. The process of bringing archives into repositories is dependent upon the interpersonal relationships and development of trust between donors and the archivists who will be entrusted with their care. The decision over what to take or reject, what the cataloguing priorities are and how items will be catalogued, what to foreground and promote through digitisation, in exhibitions and social media, is made by archivists, who will be guided by their professional training and experience, but will inevitably bring with them their own values and biases. The nature of historical records is such that it is not uncommon to be archivists to be working with material counter to their own world view, or that contain opinions, expressions and terminology that they may find outdated and offensive.
I have felt this interplay between the personal identity of the creators of the records within collections that I have been responsible for, and my own personal and professional identity, throughout my career. In sharing digitised material online, the personal dimension to open practice is highlighted in two ways. Firstly, it increases the visibility of this interplay which has always been a component of archive curation, and secondly, it highlights the necessity of individual practitioners to consider the degree to which they are willing or able to be open on a personal level in order to facilitate the development of open resources.
As I conclude this piece, I recognise that I have presented only uncertainties and come up with no solutions — this is really only a starting point for further exploration. In essence, nothing I’ve discussed has fundamentally changed my position on open practice. My professional opinion is that archives should be made available for research and interpretation by people from both within and outside the communities from which the records originate, and my job as an archivist is to facilitate that access and build relationships any interested party. Open practice is a vital component of this process. But practitioners would benefit from thinking about the already complex interplay between the personal nature of the records, the creator, the curator and the user and how this may be further complicated adding in the additional dimension of the personal nature of open practice. Though looking at open practice from a different perspective, Richard Edwards summarises the complication well: ‘…openness is not the opposite of closed-ness, nor is there simply a continuum between the two … what forms of openness are worthwhile and for whom?’
