PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the emergence of digital reformatting as a technique for preserving information within the cultural heritage preservation community by reviewing ...historical trends in modern preservation research.Design/methodology/approachThis paper analyzes secondary sources, reviews and historical texts to identify trends in the intellectual and technological histories of preservation research, beginning with the first applications of the scientific method to combating book decay in the early nineteenth to the emergence of digitization techniques in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.FindingsThis paper identifies five major historical periods in the development of preservation knowledge: the early experimental era; era of microfilm experimentation; era of professionalization; era of digital library research; and the era of digital reformatting and mass digitization; and identifies three major trends in its development: empirical inquiry, standardization and centralization.Research limitations/implicationsFindings reflect broad trends in the field of preservation, primarily in a United States context and are limited to the modern era of preservation research.Practical implicationsThis paper's broad historical overview provides a reference for preservation professionals and students in library science or archives programs. Identifying historical trends enables practitioners to critically examine their own preservation techniques and make better decisions when adopting and using new preservation technologies.Originality/valueThis paper provides a unique perspective on the history of preservation knowledge that synthesizes existing historical research in order to identify periods and trends that enable a clearer understanding of digital reformatting in its historical emergence.
Visual information dominates our modern information landscape and plays a critical role in the production of knowledge. However, research in information studies has not fully considered how people ...engage with visual information, in the form of images, visualization software and instruments, as well as audiovisual media, at the level of visual information in practice. This gap is addressed by first outlining the methodological challenges visual information practices pose to research, then reviewing recent information practices research projects that consider visual information, and concluding by offering a methodological framework drawn from the author's dissertation research for studying visual information practices, with suggestions provided for researchers who are interested in conducting research in this area.
•Research in information studies has not fully considered how people engage with visual information in practice.•Fully understanding visual information practices requires new methodological frameworks.•Adopting a multifaceted theoretical framework and generating multiple types of data enables multiple levels of analysis.•Phenomenology, discourse analysis, practice theory, and cultural structuralism can be synthesized to understand practices.
The increasing ubiquity of algorithmically mediated digital texts continues to generate debate about the instability and indeterminacy of texts. The American composer John Cage is well known for ...disrupting traditional Western aesthetics by incorporating chance operations, algorithms, and indeterminacy into his musical compositions and literary texts. This article analyzes materials found in the pre-print archive of Cage’s printed book, M (published in 1973 by Wesleyan University Press), in order to understand how Cage brought his aesthetic of indeterminacy into print. Through analysis of archival materials, it is argued that Cage exercised control over the performance and reading of his texts, even as he ceded authorial control to the aleatory processes of the I Ching—the ancient Chinese book of divination—and to the arbitrary choices of the typesetter/printer. This article offers new understanding about algorithms and indeterminacy in the performance of bibliographic codes.
Technical labor is still typically made invisible in the functioning of academic libraries and other information institutions even as they begin to disseminate technical and craft knowledge through ...makerspaces and other sites of library innovation. This paper seeks to recover one type of technical labor, digitization, as information work that embodies mental and manual activities and is both materially and intellectually productive. This paper draws on findings from an empirical study conducted by the author from 2015–2017 that used qualitative-interpretive methods to study the discursive and material practices of professional media preservationists as they worked to digitize analog video recordings in small-scale, high-quality ("artisanal") digitization projects. One key finding of this research is that in order to produce "legitimate" digital copies within their institutional contexts, media preservationists must coordinate their physical and mental activities to develop understanding of the invisible electrical signals that carry the encoded video information, blending objective and subjective modalities of knowledge. These findings have implications for understanding how the invisible labor of digitization has significant mental as well as manual dimensions, contributing to ongoing debates in information studies and the digital humanities on the relationship between "doing" and "signifying" in terms of knowledge work.
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the opportunities and challenges that immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies pose for archival theory and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual ...paper reviews research on VR adoption in information institutions and the preservation challenges of VR to identify ways in which VR has the potential to disrupt existing archival theory and practice.
Findings
Existing archival approaches are found to be disrupted by the multi-layered structural characteristics of VR, the part–whole relationships between the technological elements of VR environments and the three-dimensional content they contain and the immersive, experiential nature of VR experiences. This paper argues that drawing on perspectives from phenomenology and digital materiality is helpful for addressing the preservation challenges of VR.
Research limitations/implications
The findings extend conceptualizations of preservation by identifying gaps in existing preservation approaches to VR and stressing the importance of “experience” as a central element of archival practice and by emphasizing the embodied dimensions of interpreting archival records and the multiple scales of materiality that archival researchers and practitioners should consider to preserve VR.
Practical implications
These findings provide guidance for digital curators and preservationists by outlining the current thinking on VR preservation and the impact of VR on digital preservation strategies.
Originality/value
This paper gives new insight into VR as an emerging area of concern to digital curation and preservation and expands archival thinking with new conceptualizations that disrupt existing paradigms.
Today's virtual reality (VR) technologies enable students to traverse immersive learning environments populated with highly engaging course content that closely resembles real-world artifacts and ...sites, scientific specimens, and otherwise inaccessible training scenarios. The relative affordability of the latest generation of VR hardware has further increased the uptake of VR across academic, but careful consideration must be given to how the technology is deployed for classroom use. This paper draws on a range published research literature, and the authors' experiences implementing VR in an academic library, to present guidelines and case studies that can be used by library practitioners to craft effective VR course assignments.
Discourses on the immateriality of digital information have given way to a radical rethinking of digital materiality within information studies, cinema and media studies, and other related fields. ...This rethinking occurs as media archives are increasingly converting their collections into digital form, stored less and less on shelves in climate-controlled vaults, and instead stored and accessed through data servers. This newfound complexity and potential for the media archive to become “black boxed,” call for a critical approach to media archives that takes into account these new realities and their material entanglements at multiple scales of analysis. Newfound scholarly interest in multiple scales of materiality, from the micro (computer code, transmission protocols, etc.) to the macro (large, sociotechnical infrastructures) may offer new directions for rethinking the nature of media archives in the age of digitization. This paper reviews the literature on these recent trends and identifies three intertwined research approaches for analyzing emergent phenomena related to the digitization of media archives: Critical forensic, institutional/infrastructural, and global/ecological perspectives. These approaches help to extend postmodern conceptualizations of the archive by showing how the archive as infrastructure is bound up in unfolding political, ecological and epistemological struggles.
Since 2015, there has been a rapid increase in academic libraries focusing their services on artificial intelligence (AI), immersive technologies (XR), big data, and other technologies that align ...their interests with corporations in the tech industry. However, there are broad ethical failures within this industry that libraries are not equipped to manage and instead risk importing those failures and discriminatory thinking into library services and technologies. This paper draws on the authors’ research on XR accessibility in academic libraries to illustrate how broader trends in technocratic thinking in academia are producing socio-technical configurations that often exclude disabled library users. It argues that critical failures in designing and implementing accessibility programs for emerging technologies in academic libraries point to the broader technocratic imperatives of contemporary universities operating under the logics of neoliberalism. Accessibility is an afterthought in this context, forcing users to adjust their bodies and senses to conform to the master plans of technology designers and evangelists.
Virtual reality (VR) is a rich visualization and analytic platform that furthers the library's mission of providing access to all forms of information and supporting pedagogy and scholarship across ...disciplines. Academic libraries are increasingly adopting VR technology for a variety of research and teaching purposes, which include providing enhanced access to digital collections, offering new research tools, and constructing new immersive learning environments for students. This trend suggests that positive technological innovation is flourishing in libraries, but there remains a lack of clear guidance in the library community on how to introduce these technologies in effective ways and make them sustainable within different types of institutions. In June 2018, the University of Oklahoma hosted the second of three forums on the use of 3D and VR for visualization and analysis in academic libraries, as part of the project Developing Library Strategy for 3D and Virtual Reality Collection Development and Reuse (LIB3DVR), funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This qualitative study invited experts from a range of disciplines and sectors to identify common challenges in the visualization and analysis of 3D data, and the management of VR programs, for the purpose of developing a national library strategy.
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