Documenting things: bringing archival thinking to interdisciplinary collaborations

Abstract

Unlike many archival organisations, the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) is not a custodial repository or a teaching facility. This allows the centre to collaborate with a wide range of organisations and individuals, bringing archival thinking and practice to a variety of sectors, many of which are not traditionally associated with information professionals. Central to all the ESRC’s work is the importance of effectively documenting things and their context. This paper draws on project examples, the author’s PhD research and key concepts from archival and knowledge management theory to explore the idea that effective documentation requires more than a focus on items and collections. Instead, it requires working with individuals, organisations and documentary resources (published and unpublished) to reveal explicit connections and capture implicit knowledge in ways which more accurately reflect the complexity of collections and the entities needed to understand them. These ideas are introduced using two examples: a series of projects carried out over many years with the Victorian Government’s Department of Primary Industries and its successors and The Australian Ballet. The paper then uses key concepts from this work to explore the nature of museum documentation and some of the limitations of current practice in museums, including the specific example of the Nordström mining models held by Museum Victoria. Thinking about these issues in the digital world, and applying archival thinking, the author argues for better connections between collection materials, not through convergence but by expanding our concept of collection documentation to include the relationships between things as things in their own right. Arguing for the practical benefits of such a change, the paper concludes by suggesting that testing these ideas in a museum context has the potential to further develop the ideas of the ESRC in ways which will benefit society.

Keywords:

• Archives
• museums
• documentation
• context
• knowledge management

Introduction

So, the current thinking underpinning discussions about convergence in Australia is based on what we hold and what we do, rather than how we think. Our challenge as archivists is translating how we think about our material into the digital world. (Sassoon, 2007, p. 44)

The eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) is something of an anomaly, both in an Australian context and internationally. Though largely managed and run by archivists, the centre does not meet the Australian Society of Archivists’ custodially focused definition of an ‘archival institution’ which requires that the organisation be ‘devoted as its sole or a major part of its function to the care and custody of archives’ (Australian Society of Archivists, 2015). Operating with different constraints and pressures to a custodial archive, the primary focus for ESRC staff is to think not about what we hold but about how to bring archival thinking to physical and digital material in the community through collaborative projects with a range of people and organisations, many of them outside the library and archives sectors.

‘Archival thinking’ – ‘how we think about our material’, in Sassoon’s terms (2007, p. 44) – is used in this paper to indicate particular ways of thinking about collections that are seen as central to archival practice which, when considered together, help distinguish the work of archivists from that of librarians, or of collections managers and curators in museums. This includes the following:

•	describing items in aggregate as a means of controlling and understanding collections,
•	the belief that the order in which material is kept and used contributes to its meaning,
•	an interest in determining and capturing information about provenance,
•	a recognition that the context in which records are created and managed (including people, organisational structures, concepts, places and other entities) is essential to understanding their content,
•	an understanding that these are all part of a system of relationships and connections which helps provide meaning to each individual component and
•	a focus on sustainable practice to help ensure these systems are documented and managed effectively so as to remain accessible and understandable over long periods of time.

The term ‘things’ is also used frequently in this paper. Drawing on the work of Ian Hodder (2012), it is used to avoid making distinctions between the man-made and natural, artefacts and specimens, clearly defined physical objects and more amorphous entities. The term should be taken to include physical and digital things, unless otherwise specified. Hodder’s conception of ‘things’ is necessarily broad. In using it, he does not attempt to draw boundaries between things based on classifications, formats, characteristics or types. But, where Hodder uses the term as part of an investigation into the entanglement of material culture, people and society, here the primary focus is on how that type of knowledge can be captured using documentation.

This lies at the core of the majority of the ESRC’s projects: the need to effectively document interconnected collections of things to ensure collections-based knowledge is preserved and remains discoverable, accessible and understandable through time. Much of the ESRC’s work also involves collaborative projects with groups and organisations and is focused on better ways of managing collections of things, not just by describing the things themselves but by employing a methodology for revealing implicit knowledge and capturing it in a structured, useful form.

This paper introduces these aspects of the ESRC’s work using two examples – The Australian Ballet Archive and ongoing work with the Victorian Department of Primary Industries and its successors – before turning to the author’s current doctoral research project on interconnected archives and object collections in the museum sector, in particular within Museum Victoria (MV). Through an exploration of work carried out with these three organisations (much of which is still ongoing), the paper reveals how applying archival thinking in a variety of non-archival contexts contributes to more effective, sustainable organisational practice and more discoverable knowledge for society.

Implicit knowledge in agriculture and dance

Since 2011, the ESRC has had a long-standing collaborative relationship with the Victorian Department of Primary Industries, which became the Department of Environment and Primary Industries in 2013, and is now part of the Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources (hereafter, the Department). As its various names suggest, the Department has been through numerous restructures and related transformations in recent years, a political and public service tendency in Australia which has gradually become entrenched since the Second World War. Over the same period, the Department has also utilised many digital systems while continuing to grapple with the legacy of earlier technologies. These factors all contributed to a broad organisational knowledge problem. Internally, people found it difficult to locate things produced by projects, programs and initiatives outside their own area; and, both internally and externally, anything but the most current web content, strategy documents and reports were difficult to locate and (if found) hard to understand due to a lack of information about who produced them, why and in what context (Jones, McCarthy, & Lewis, 2011; McCarthy, Jones, Vines, & Lewis, 2012).

Many organisations have problems capturing and preserving knowledge in useful forms. The literature related to organisational knowledge management often refers to three types of knowledge: tacit, implicit and explicit. Briefly, tacit knowledge refers to the thoughts, experiences, skills and other personal attributes people bring to any given situation. True tacit knowledge cannot be made explicit, being inextricably bound up in the life and history of the individual it inhabits (Al-Hawamdeh, 2002; Polanyi, 1958). At the other end of the spectrum, explicit knowledge is that which has been expressed or formalised in records (using that term in its broadest sense), making it accessible to others (Watson, 2006). Information professionals are sometimes associated with this latter category, as one component of their work is to manage and provide access to collections of books, records, documents and so on. And somewhere between the two is implicit knowledge, which is knowledge held and used by individuals that has not yet been made explicit, but which could be captured and expressed in more explicit forms (Al-Hawamdeh, 2002).

Only associating information professionals with the management of explicit knowledge would be an oversimplification. Archivists, for example, capture and maintain more than just descriptive information about explicit records from the past. They also capture information about recordkeeping systems and work with individuals and organisations to make implicit knowledge about context, provenance and other entities explicit to aid people with the discovery, understanding and use of collections.

The Department’s problem therefore went beyond just the need to manage documents and was as much about the need to more effectively manage organisational knowledge and history. Through involvement in a number of consultancies, ESRC staff introduced archival thinking – working with items in aggregate, focusing on provenance and context and so on – to the agricultural section of the Department. This included workshops and the provision of a ‘lessons learned’ report on managing knowledge in the public sphere (Jones & McCarthy, 2011), and the provision of analysis and commentary on the American eXtension initiative (Vines, Jones, & McCarthy, 2013), an initiative which was subsequently introduced to Australia as a pilot. More recently, the author has been involved with the Department in the design, development and deployment of a new Knowledge Curation Tool (KCT) which utilises two standards, with some local variation: Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) and ISAAR (CPF) (International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families) (State Government of Victoria, 2011; ICA, 2004). Together these standards support the structured description of resources, collections and the relationships between them; the people, organisations and other entities required to effectively contextualise these (referred to in KCT as ‘Creators and Concepts’); the description of relationships between these entities that are both synchronic (existing at a particular time) and diachronic (evolving and changing through time); and the description of relationships between contextual entities and other things such as resources and collections. While there is still much to do, particularly in the area of training and capability development, KCT and the processes which support it would not have been accepted by the Department without several years working with staff combining archival thinking and standards with knowledge management concepts, and developing ways to effectively communicate and apply these within their specific organisational context.

Though significantly smaller than the Department, The Australian Ballet is of sufficient size and structure to also contain silos of content and knowledge within the organisation. Separate collections of things are held by different sections and departments – those responsible for costumes, music, stage design, contracts, performance records and more – creating difficulties for people who need to discover and access material from across the organisation. However, the ability to access, understand and bring together this material is precisely what is required to prepare and mount a production on stage. Two important factors help enable this: the tacit and implicit knowledge of staff, many of whom have worked for the company for many years or decades, and the physical arrangement of the various collections of things throughout the institution. Almost without exception, departments store collections ordered by ballet – such as Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, or Rudolf Nureyev’s Don Quixote – creating common but separate structures across the organisation.

In working with The Australian Ballet, the author and colleagues from the ESRC interviewed staff, surveyed the physical collections and provided advice on documentation, digitisation and storage. Once again, the focus here was not on listing or cataloguing individual files and discrete documents. Having established the ballet production as a key organising principle, the ESRC recommended that the organisation capture ‘repertoire level’ detail about their organisation digitally and then work down to collection-level descriptions of content and key information about people, organisational structure and history, thereby making this information generally accessible to staff without needing to know who to ask or which room and shelf to visit.

Both projects utilised archival thinking about process, documentation, organisational history and context to help to improve the management and accessibility of collections and collections-based knowledge in organisations, not just through the more effective documentation of discrete things but also by making implicit knowledge explicit as structured, standards-based metadata. Central to each was a methodology called Context Entity Analysis, used to identify key people, organisations, events and other contextual elements required to effectively understand and document collections and their contents (McCarthy et al., 2012). The ESRC’s involvement brought with it expertise related to knowledge management, the capture of implicit knowledge and context in a structured, sustainable way, the building of information networks to document organisational history and the use of standards-based metadata. These form part of the principles by which the ESRC works more broadly (McCarthy & Evans, 2012).

Things in museums

Unlike the agricultural sector and The Australian Ballet, documenting things is part of a museum’s core business. From the use of registers, printed catalogues and index cards to automation and the introduction of computers in the mid-1960s, the emergence of desktop computers in the 1980s and the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, collection documentation in museums has been through numerous phases. All have been based on recording two key types of information: inherent data (size, colour, shape, material and other details which can be confirmed by examining a thing) and attributed data which cannot be ascertained this way, such as where and when a thing was collected, who donated it to the museum, or the context of its use (Chenhall, 1975; Hart & Hallett, 2011; Jones-Garmil, 1995).

Museums tend to have a different relationship to interpretation and dissemination when compared with libraries and archives. Robinson explores this idea in her critique of ‘memory institutions’, a term which is used by Dempsey (2000) and others to bundle libraries, archives and museums into a single category. Robinson argues that library users tend to be the ones who synthesise collection content to produce knowledge and narratives, and the meaning of archival materials is often personal or undisclosed, whereas with museums, it is the institution rather than their users that ‘produce meanings and histories’ (Robinson, 2012, pp. 419, 421). She continues: this ‘defining characteristic’ is jeopardised when ‘individual object records are accessed directly at item level, as often occurs when visitors use digital museum collection databases. The challenge for museums with digital collection access will be to maintain the interpretative scaffolding that renders basic collection records meaningful’ (Robinson, 2012, p. 422).

Robinson’s term ‘interpretative scaffolding’ suggests the interconnected things – people, organisations, concepts, records and so on – noted in previous sections. Some specific examples help to understand how item-level descriptions often work in museums and the ways in which missing context (or ‘scaffolding’) can create barriers to effective discovery, understanding and use.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the first director of the National Museum of Victoria, Frederick McCoy, commissioned a number of mining models from Carl E. Nordström. These colourful assemblages were painted scale models of tools, equipment, human figures and landscapes created to depict mining techniques on the Victorian goldfields. The way these items are documented in the museum’s collection management system is fairly consistent in their use of fielded data, such as their classification and association to a basic authority record for Nordström. However, further investigation reveals some interesting variations. For example, the title for ST 011072, Alluvial Mining Model – Daisy Hill, Shallow Sinkings, Carl Nordström, 1858 (Item ST 11072, ‘Alluvial Mining Model – Daisy Hill, Shallow Sinkings, Carl Nordström, 1858,’ MV Collections, http://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/400938) is technical and the summary short and factual. When the same item is presented on MV’s Favourite Objects web page, it is called simply a ‘Gold Mining Model’ but is then accompanied by a longer overview, alongside a video and video transcript discussing its historical context and manufacture (http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/whatson/current-exhibitions/melbournestory/favourite-objects/gold-mining-at-daisy-hill/?mode=i). None of this additional context appears as part of the object record.

Some of this contextual information is included in the object summary for another model, ST 011877, Mining Model – Surfacing & Puddling, Shallow Alluvial Workings, Victoria, circa 185 (Item ST 11877, ‘Mining Model – Surfacing & Puddling, Shallow Alluvial Workings, Victoria, circa 1857,’ MV Collections, http://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/405651) as follows:

It is part of a series of ten models depicting aspects of mining techniques on the Victorian goldfields, built between 1857 and 1860, by the Swedish-born miner Carl Nordström for Professor Fredrick McCoy, founding director of the National Museum of Victoria. In May 1856, McCoy was appointed as chair of the three-member Mining Commission of Victoria, established by the Victorian Legislative Assembly to investigate ‘the modes of working or procuring and treating ores’ on the Victorian goldfields. McCoy was originally introduced to Nordström, through the mining engineer, Henry Smith, who he met when the Mining Commission visited Ballarat and it was through the Commission that McCoy secured government funding for the construction of the models.

‘Surfacings’ originally formed part of a set of three related models intended to represent the three main modes of alluvial gold mining practised in Victoria: surface workings, shallow sinkings and deep lead mining.

Though clearly relevant to more than just ST 011877, this detail is embedded in the object summary for a single item, whereas similar historical detail for ST 006754, Quartz Mine & Treatment Works Model – Port Phillip & Colonial Gold Mining Co. Clunes, 1858, is again not part of the object record. Instead, it is held in the Narratives module of the museum’s collection management system, as part of an entry which was used to generate the content for the Treasures of the Museum publication (Museum Victoria, 2004) where it was presented as the ‘Clunes quartz mining model’. This publication is not referenced as part of the record for ST 006754; likewise, none of the three records discussed include reference to the 1990 thesis by Aitken, The Mining Collection of the National Museum of Victoria, 1856–1871, which contains valuable historical information about the models, Nordström, and their relationship to McCoy and his museum in the nineteenth century, though this work is catalogued and is in the museum’s library. Similarly, there is a section in Rasmussen and Museum Victoria’s (2001) history of the museum which discusses the mining collection, including the models (Aitken, 2001), also not referenced.

Thinking both archivally and in terms of implicit and explicit knowledge, there are numerous issues here. Inconsistent titles and summaries make it difficult for the general user to recognise the same thing when encountered in different contexts. Descriptive text relevant to multiple things is embedded in the summary of a single thing rather than being recorded as part of hierarchically structured description, and this text refers to 10 models, yet at the time of writing, only two are accessible to the general public via the Museum’s Collections Online site. There is no collection description or other information available telling us about the ‘full set’ of mining models, nor can we get to information about Nordström, McCoy, Smith or the various institutions and organisations mentioned. The various contracts, agreements and appointments described would all have generated archival records, at least some of which have survived, but no reference or link to these is apparent. And publications (all of which are held in the museum’s library) are not linked to or referenced in the object descriptions. The detail provided is almost entirely attributed data, but there is no link to supporting evidence.

A general user looking at Collections Online therefore encounters two ‘individual object records’ (to use Robinson’s phrase), but little of the scaffold of meaning required to understand their rich history and context. And yet there are many things which could be documented, including the following:

•	10 mining models by Nordström (objects)
•	Carl E. Nordström (person)
•	Professor Frederick McCoy (person)
•	Henry Smith (person)
•	The National Museum of Victoria (organisation)
•	The Nordström Mining Models Collection (collection)
•	The MV Mining Collection (collection)
•	The Mining Commission of Victoria (organisation)
•	Port Phillip & Colonial Gold Mining Co. (organisation)
•	Ballarat (place)
•	Clunes (place)
•	Treasures of the Museum (publication)
•	The Mining Collection of the National Museum of Victoria, 1856–1871 (publication)
•	A Museum for the People (publication)

There are no doubt more. These are significant collection items – as noted above, at least one has been singled out as a ‘treasure of the museum’ – and there are staff in the institution who know their origin and history. Conservation staff have worked on the objects over the years, and they have been featured in publications and exhibitions. The Nordström models could be viewed as sitting at the centre of a complex network of people, organisations, events, concepts, publications and records, some of which lie at the core of the purpose and intent of the museum as it was conceived in the second-half of the nineteenth century, but much of this knowledge remains implicit and inaccessible.

What is more, there is a whole range of relationships between these things which need to be documented. Each mining model was built by Nordström on a particular date and in a particular place. McCoy was appointed to the Mining Commission, as chair, in May 1956, and McCoy met Smith in Ballarat. These relationships are located in time and space and have their own attributes and descriptions distinct from the two things that they relate, all of which necessitates their being described as things in their own right.

Thinking about these issues in the digital world, as urged by Sassoon, the network of content surrounding the mining models does not need to be described using linear narrative text, as might be the case in a print catalogue or a panel of text in an exhibition space. The description of each of these could exist as an independent entity record and be related to other things, reducing duplicated description and building a digital non-hierarchical network that in its potential multiplicity and treatment of relationships as things is conceptually a step beyond the interpretative scaffolding Robinson sees as a fundamental characteristic of museums.

The case for change

As part of his current doctoral research project, the author is exploring the practical problems associated with the ways in which museums manage and document their collections, based on examples such as the one above and drawing on his past experience working in organisations such as the Department and at The Australian Ballet. Most notable are the interrelated problems of inaccessible context, missing evidence, lost knowledge and constrained perspectives.

First, people increasingly access collection items digitally as well as, or instead of, visiting physical institutions and exhibition spaces. Information about online items is generally populated from underlying collection management systems which results in discrete, even sparse entries for things, providing little contextual information and few pathways for further exploration. Curatorial and interpretative work is impractical for much of this material, while federated collections, keywords and search filters still leave most of the effort with the individual user while keeping important aspects of institutional knowledge out of public view (Jones, 2015). Documenting context entities, including relationships, as things in their own right is therefore vital to enrich online engagement with and understanding of collections.

Second, the authority of the institution is no longer unquestioned, and (again due largely to digital access and dissemination) documentation is not solely for the benefit of curatorial staff and a small number of privileged researchers. Claims made about provenance, cultural background, intended use and similar attributed data should therefore be linked to evidence. Doing so supports scholarship, helps maintain trust and shows generosity to the wide range of users and communities who wish to embark on their own research.

Third, collecting institutions cannot continue to rely so heavily on individuals as a means of maintaining key knowledge. When experienced curators, collection managers and other staff leave, they will inevitably take experience and skills (tacit knowledge) with them, but there is a great deal of implicit knowledge – such as mental models of collections, and known sources, evidence, records and documentation – which could be captured to reduce the amount that is lost when people move or retire. Even while key staff remain, where users do not have access to the ‘right person’, they are likely to remain unaware of significant collections knowledge and may repeat a great deal of work unnecessarily (Interview with E. Bonshek by Mike Jones, 22 March 2016).

Finally, it is perhaps inevitable that museums and the people who work in them have particular perspectives on their collections. Natural science staff may be interested in the scientific analysis of specimens, but not in the sociocultural digressions found in a collector’s diary and correspondence (Interview with T. Trombone by Mike Jones, 20 April 2016). Likewise, a curator specialising in social history might want to investigate how a piece of machinery changed working practices and leisure time, with little care for the fact that the same machine utilised a new type of valve which influenced mechanical engineers in a different sector. Describing things with discrete records organised by discipline-based classification structures can further lock these items into particular domains, making it difficult for users with different interests and perspectives from reading across or against existing interpretations. Rich non-hierarchical relationships to other things based on references, common creators, places, events and similar entities aid with ‘disembedding’ (McKemmish, 2001, p. 336) them from their specific institutional context, allowing users to traverse established boundaries and follow their own interests.

Conclusion

Museums are an ideal testing ground for these ideas. With regard to collections knowledge and relationships, these institutions have many of the same issues as those found in organisations such as the Department and The Australian Ballet. Information often exists in siloed departments and systems, and there is an over-reliance on both implicit knowledge and knowledge that – while explicit – is difficult to discover and access. But in addition to this, unlike the Department and the ballet, a primary concern for museums is the capture, preservation and dissemination of knowledge to diverse communities. For information professionals, delving into museums (which often also contain archives and libraries) exposes some of the key limitations of current practice in the sector as a whole and provides evidence for the negative impacts that result. Furthermore, museums tend to have institutional longevity and large amounts of legacy data (often in legacy systems), while continually seeking to engage in new and innovative ways with audiences and the public. This offers a complex yet receptive real-world environment in which to test new conceptual and technological approaches to managing and disseminating collections-based knowledge.

While aggregating discrete records from the museum’s library catalogue, archival listings and collection management system into a shared, seamless space may help internal and external users more quickly discover a selection of items that may be explicitly related, each person who searches will need to once again build the scaffolding for themselves. Current digital technology makes the capturing of such scaffolding possible. In the past, including in the first decades of computerisation in museums, technological limitations prevented the capture of complex relational structures, particularly ones which could be readily navigated by general users. Now, time and human resources are a more significant barrier. But, as outlined in the previous section, there are clear reasons to act, and documentation does not all need to be reshaped overnight. The issue is more that, as knowledge is discovered and uncovered, some aspects are not being captured. It is this belief which has led to the author’s current doctoral research with MV and museums more broadly.

Returning to Sassoon’s piece on archival thinking, she argues: ‘the constituent parts of a cultural and physical landscape are part of a broader system. This broader system is a network of related entities interacting together with their non-living (physical, geographical and administrative) environment’ (Sassoon, 2007, p. 45). As an archivist and historian, the primary focus in the author’s doctoral research is not on what museums and their archives hold, but on the potential benefits of thinking archivally about the ‘museum system’ as a whole. These are the types of systems in which archivists must intervene, and which must then be effectively documented, if we hope to enact change.

Documenting systems of things and their relationships, including documenting relationships as things, lies at the heart of the ESRC’s practice. The potential benefits of this approach can be seen in the ESRC’s work with the Department and the ballet, as well as on the history of Australian science, Australian women’s history, the management of nuclear waste and the history of the institutional ‘care’ of children in the twentieth century. The thinking developed in these projects has directly informed the author’s research with MV, and that work will in turn help further develop the ESRC’s conceptual and practical approach to capturing, preserving and disseminating collections-based knowledge for the benefit of society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Michael Jones is a Consultant Research Archivist with the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre. He is also a freelance consultant, a PhD candidate with the University’s School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and a Research Associate at Museum Victoria. Since 2008, he has worked on numerous paper-based and digital archival projects and with academics, government departments, community organisations and the GLAM sector to explore the potential of collections and structured informatic systems to support organisational and public knowledge.

Notes

^* This paper has been double-blind peer reviewed to meet the Department of Higher Education’s Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) requirements.