Gavan McCarthy
Director,
Australian Science Archives
Project
University of Melbourne
203 Bouverie Street
Carlton Victoria 3053
Australia
Introduction:
I would like to start by thanking Professor Bill Logan and the organisers of this forum for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today. It is a great pleasure for me to be here, to have my horizons expanded and my enthusiasm re-charged.
It is of interest to me that this gathering, focusing on University and Heritage, has attracted so few archivists. Indeed, I may be the only archivist present (and I am not even a University Archivist). If there are any others here, particularly from overseas, I would be most keen to meet you before the forum concludes.
A number of people I have met here have commented on the fact that the various arms of the heritage industry, those professions whose stated aim involves the preservation of cultural heritage in some form, remain relatively isolated from each other. Certainly, in Australia, the museum, built heritage, natural heritage, library and archives communities (to name but a few) have strong internal infrastructures and evolving discourses but venture only rarely into each other’s territory.
I do not plan to explore the reasons for this in today’s paper but suggest that perhaps my presence at this conference and the subject of this talk indicate that these divides are starting to be bridged.
Very simply this paper is about the World Wide Web and how we can use it to manage our cultural heritage resources, locally, nationally and internationally, in ways that have never been possible before.
As another aside, it has also been of interest to me that the Internet and the World Wide Web has barely raised its head in this forum. It is difficult to go anywhere these days without being besieged by "Web heads" and stories of the impact of the virtual world. I found out about this meeting through email and most subsequent communications arrived via the same means. However, beyond that the WWW does not seem to have figured much in the discussions. Is there a reason for this? Is it because most people here are focused on the preservation of building, place and monument? The preservation of the "real" heritage rather than some facsimile or surrogate? Or do we now just take it for granted.
But again, this not the purpose of this talk. (Perhaps it something to be discussed over dinner and few glasses of good Victorian red wine).
With regard to the use of the Web, however, I do not want talk about publishing guides, books, mounting online exhibitions, creating virtual spaces or reconstructions, or graphic surrogates of reality in this new medium. That has been covered in other places and other times.
What I want to discuss is the use of this new medium as a tool, to introduce structure and functionality into the Web to enable collaborative, collective and interactive frameworks that will link all aspects of the heritage industry (archives, museums, art galleries, the built environment and the natural environment -my apologies if I have missed anyone!).
Indeed, our heritage is created, emerges from, the activities of the past in an environment that is integrated, where all the bits of person’s / organisation’s / indeed community’s life are connected through the passage of time and across space - connected by those lives and those individual stories. The heritage industry, through its various components mentioned above, attempts to preserve and make accessible remnants of this past to help us understand and make sense of our life now. Unfortunately, in the process, the integrated whole is divided up into various bits and distributed accordingly: records to archives, objects to museums etc. with the architectural and place remnants, the immovable heritage, remaining in situ The context and meaning of the whole is reduced through the separation of the parts. By bringing structure and function to the Web we can create the means, the framework, the infrastructure by which we can begin to draw these threads back together.
But I am not talking about fantasy and imagined possibilities, we already have the beginnings of this structure and function in the pioneering work been done by the Australian Science Archives Project at the University of Melbourne and also currently being actively explored at the national level in the United Kingdom and North America.
For the rest of the talk I will be referring to authority records,
which form the heart or foundation of this proposed Web-based infrastructure
for heritage resource management and access.
Authority Records
In 1995 the International Council on Archives (ICA) published a draft standard for archival authority records and encouraged archival institutions around the world to look at how this standard could be used to improve the management of and access to archival records. The uptake of the standard has been slow but I will not go into the reasons for that here.
The ICA is of course a sister organisation
to ICOM, ICOMOS etc. and an affiliate of UNESCO. In August I was elected
to the ICA Steering Committee for its Section on University and Research
Institution Archives for a four year term and I also serve on the Steering
Committee of their Science, Technology and Medicine Archives special interest
group.
But what is an authority record?
It is a concept that has been used extensively in the library community but it is also used in many other areas. The role of the authority record is to define an "entity" in a structured and standard way which provides an unambiguous link between the entity itself and other things, objects, information or whatever may need to be connected to that entity (for whatever purpose). The authority record becomes the information or digital surrogate of the entity itself.
An entity, of course in the real world, could be any thing that has or does exist. For librarians, they are books and journals etc., for the Road Traffic Authority, they are drivers and cars, trailers, motor bikes etc. Authority records permeate the whole of society and enable many of its function to be performed successfully. The important thing about an authority record is that it is a constant - it is stable (and unique in a functional sense) both across space and through time. By way of example, for the Road Traffic Authority, a drivers licence entry in the RTA database would be an authority record and be used to interrelate a number variables (for example, payment of fees and fines).
In the Archival world, the ICA standard for authority records has been focused on families, persons and corporate bodies. These authority records register key information about the creators of records and artefacts and act as linking points for information about related or associated records and artefacts no matter where they are located or how they are described.
Of course, within the multi-layered
world of archival documentation other lesser authority records exist to
manage individual record units, series, function and location. But they
are not the focus of this talk.
What can we do with authority records?
The proposal that I would like to put forward is that the WWW be used as a tool to create a network of creator or provenance (in the archival sense) authority records based on the ICA standard. To keep this within a local context let us restrict our vision to the establishment of a national network but of course the Web is world wide and the ICA would love to see their standard universally adopted.
Also, in the first instance it may be sensible to stay within the framework of the ICA standard and confine the concept to families, persons and corporate bodies. Indeed, there is plenty to be achieved within those confines but we should not limit our vision to the possibilities of incorporating other entity types in the future. For those interested in exploring these issues in relation to museum classification systems and the potential offered through the utilisation of the WWW should explore the recent work of Alain Michard and Giang Pham-Dac.
The Web provides the mechanics of the network and the ICA standard provides the intellectual rigor necessary to bring consistency and interoperability. By creating the network on the Web the work is distributed, quite naturally, to those organisations or individuals committed to a particular area of the heritage mosaic.
So for example,
The ICA standard makes allowance for parallel entries which means an authority record host, for example ASAP, can develop authority records with a specific focus on Australian science, technology and medicine knowing that the parallel records will be picked up and linked to through the mechanisms of the network. The concept of an Australian Network of Archival Authority Records is discussed in more detail in an ASAP submission to the National Library of Australia’s Review of Reference Services.
Universities through their archives, museums and art galleries are primary candidates to create and host subject or focused authority record registers. Using standards to achieve consistency and interoperability and the Web to create seamless inter-connectivity there is the opportunity to work towards a cultural heritage infrastructure that would revolutionize both management and access.
But has this been tested anywhere?
The development of the World Wide Web during the 1990s has enabled the testing of the authority record concept as the locus of management and connectivity in the archival environment. The results and impact of this implementation has revealed that we are indeed on the verge of a paradigm shift in the whole area of cultural heritage management if we can harness the power the Web.
The Australian Science Archives Project has participated in this testing through Bright Sparcs, a Web-based multi-media information resource focused on the history, archives and artefacts of Australian science, technology and medicine.
Bright Sparcs can be traced to very beginnings of ASAP in 1985. As a non-collecting archival organisation our focus from the outset was on information collection, processing and presentation. Initially, without computer databases, we were extremely limited in some aspects of our work. However, the advent of the PC led to the Register of the Archives of Science in Australia in 1987, its mounting on the Library online networks in the late 1980s and in 1993-4 it was mounted on the Internet and the World Wide Web.
From the outset we structured our data using the authority record concept (though we did not describe it as such at the time) and it should be noted that this was not in accord with "standard" practice at the time. So it was with some delight that the 1995 ICA authority record standard meshed beautifully with what we had developed through investigation, synthesis, creativity and implementation.
Since that time we have been maintaining and developing the site as funding has allowed (it has been extremely difficult to fund I should point out). Initially use was limited but the phenomenal uptake of Web in 1997-98 has led to any extraordinary use of the site, both nationally and internationally. I should point out that the site contains some 6,000 web pages highly linked information objects and is great fun to explore in its own right. All the information objects on the site are database managed which makes updating the site a fairly automatic process.
This experience has revealed just how powerful this tool can be as it provides an immediate and spontaneous means of interacting with a highly distributed user-group.
Conclusion:
What can I say in conclusion. I feel that I have only begun to scratch the surface in the 20 minutes available for this presentation, not just of the possibilities but also of what we have already learned and experienced.
I hope you have some sense of what is possible and are starting to think about how these ideas could be used to create the universal frameworks for cooperation and collaboration that are the vision of the heritage community represented here. It is important that we move now to use the technology to hand to link all the heritage communities in a virtual world that supports and promotes the preservation of the real world.