The reading this week examines 'documentation work' and the nature of 'documentation.'
Please read the following:
- Introduction and Chapter 1 in course textbook: Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions
- Michael Buckland, "A Brief Biography of Suzanne Briet" : http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/Brietaut2.pdf
- Michael Buckland, "What is a Document?" : http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/whatdoc.html
Make your decision about your research paper topic in the next week or two. I'll provided a Rubric and Assignment Guidelines next week.
Best,
Aaron
A document is anything that can be studied: an image, a object, a piece of paper with writing on it. Briet has rules that must be met before something can be a document: material, intention, objects must be processed, and phenomenological position (the object must be perceived as a document). So what are archivists doing preserving all of these objects and paperwork? They are corroborating events, they are keeping things alive (so to say), they are creating a historic timeline. Ultimately, they are putting documentation (in its various forms) in a logical system.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Melanie. Your notion of a "logical system" is what we are looking at in Week 4-- i.e. the representation and access systems or arrangement/description.
DeleteThe nature and purpose of documentation work is to document the past and present. In order to be successful in documentation work, archivist need to ask insightful questions, understand document appraisal, generate functional analysis, form responses to complex considerations, and understand the context of documents. Archivist with the above skills will make successful decision about people, events, and ideas when completing documentation work. Samuels states, “The shape to a major degree of what society can know about its self”, when talking about what documentation work does. In turn, the main job of an archivist is documentation work and preserving the past and present for society is a learned skill they must have.
ReplyDeleteThe reading about Briet shows the progression of documentation work through the ambitions of Suzanne Briet who wrote, “What is Documentation?” and spent her life as a professional archivist through her works. Briet was Vice President of the International Federation for Documentation, served on committees, developing professional education, and participating in conferences. Michael Buckland states, “…she was acutely aware of the importance of standards, collaboration, and interoperability. She helped coordinate standards development after the Second World War, she served on the International Standards Organisation T46 committee for Documentation, her Salle des catalogues served as secretariat of the development of a French cataloging code, and she was partly responsible for the development of that code.” The Briet’s achievements is long but it shows her forward thinking of documentation work. Her work helped pave the way for future archivist by preserving the past and present for society through documentation editing.
As for our paper, I am thinking of writing about the Information life-cycle. Would this be okay or do I need narrow it down?
Nice work here, Channell.
DeleteRegarding your topic-- I think it is actually *too narrow* *rather than too broad) as it is. The "information life cycle" is a model(or conceptual scheme) for thinking about the life of information within organizations.
Beyond describing the model-- which could be done in 2-3 pages (at most), I'm not sure what else could be said.
If you wanted, however, to broaden it by applying the model to a specific organization (i.e. a business or association or something), and illustrate the roles, responsibilities, functions of records & information managers/archivists in managing information throughout its life-cycle-- then, yes, I can see 10 pages.
Make sense? If not, send me an email and we can chat.
~ATR
The nature and purpose of documentation work is to preserve, manage, and organize documents in a way that is useful, relevant, and, if possible, recreate a story--frame by frame. A document, according to Briet, do not have to be flat. She argues that they are three dimensional as well. Artifacts, material culture, anything that can be studied fall under the umbrella of documents. I really enjoyed the anthropological/archaeological perspective of the documentation theory. We find it necessary to organize and maintain documents because they carry meaning. Samuel's theory of documentation touched on archivist as having the power to tell as story, and the importance of learning what story to tell, and defining the audience. She emphasized critical thinking about what might be missing from the collection, or being inclusive of several audiences when approaching documentation and archival practices.
ReplyDeleteArchivists are responsible, not only for curation, but for the "creation and appraisal" of records. Their importance is in the many ways in which the archivist is able to create meaning and flow of the documents for posterity.
Thanks, April. Thoughtful and articulate reply. (Please note you are a week behind here).
ReplyDeleteArchivists are presenting the story of their documents when creating and refining their archives. As a pioneer in documentation work, Briet is correct when she interestingly says that documents do not necessarily refer only to paper but can embrace any material or item that is studied. Samuels seems preoccupied with how to tailor a message to a specific audience rather than letting the facts speak for themselves.
ReplyDelete