Manifesto for an Active Archive
From CopyCult
| Table of contents |
An Active Archive
Most of the interesting cultural archives that have been developed these last years have taken advantage of the new facilities of publishing. Creating webpages, displaying information has been easier and easier. In the cultural field, this has produced websites that were mirroring information brochures, anouncements and text-publishing.
For the most part, they were conceived as "We" give information to "You". But today, the challenge is not about setting up uni-directional communication channels, it is about information circulating back and forth. About giving material away and receiving it transformed. About enriching content by allowing different connections, different contexts.
An active archive is an archive which is not only open for reading but also open for re-appropriation, comment, divergences, transformations.
The need for a decentralized archive
(we are no islands)
Digital cultural archives today fall into two categories: fragmented archives and uber-centralized archives. Fragmented archives look like isolated islands. Every institution sitting on top of its treasure. Sometimes producing a timid rss feed. Centralized archives gather collections and resources from different origins but erase the context of their information. Accessibility and searchability at the cost of uniformisation.
This manifesto is a plea for a decentralized archive: an archive constituted from many sites and voices that keep their own contexts while not being afraid of sharing, mirroring, connecting and using common protocols.
The importance of controlling the infrastructure
(we are not 2.0)
Public televisions publishing their archives on YouTube, librairies working in partnership with Google, etc. Why not using the web 2.0 infrastructure? Flickr + MySpace + FaceBook with a glue of Delicious: who needs more? If many of the functionalities of the Web 2.0 have had a great impact on popularising the digital archive, beware of the terms of use. Uploading digital culture on the servers of the dotcom billionnaires maybe not such a good idea after all. The status of the archive would fluctuate between footage for ad-placement and honey pot for market profilers.
An active archive should provide to its contributors a clean/clear contract where the terms of the participation are fair and legible for everyone. The goal of an active archive is to produce more interesting content in the first place. Not to make profit in monitoring the users and selling their behaviour patterns. Only when the different parties own the infrastructure and accept to share it, they can ensure the conditions for access without strings attached.
Licenses for content to clarify the conditions for everyone. Free software so everybody co-own the source code.
The need for media publishing
(it is more than text)
An active archive needs to go beyond mere text-publishing. Video, audio, images are produced on a regular basis by artists and institutions, cultural groups. Be it for archivng purpose or for communication or creation. Media contents require different material configurations to be distributed: as they need more disk space and more bandwith, they require clever strategies of distribution. The Peer To Peer networks have pioneered large scale experiments with the distribution of audiovisual media. It is time to learn the lesson.
Integrating audiovisual media into an archive is not just adding black boxes to an archive. It requires a new approach to navigation, search, linking, subtitling, translation that can connect media content to text-based content.
The need for a decent classification system
(between tags and ontologies)
An archive needs a system of classification. To improve the search facilities, to group elements and link them. Librarians and archivists are used to existing standards. But the works produced and discussed within contemporary culture tend to escape these classification schemes.
An Active Archive requires the creation and discussion of vocabularies and taxonomies that can evolve, diverge or merge. These vocabularies and taxonomies should neither be brutally top-down or completely flat. The system should stimulate the sharing of common classifications, allow for divergence and promote convergence of knowledge trees. Active Archive needs a classification with a diff.
