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- Title
Beyond Clicks, Likes, and Downloads: Identifying Meaningful Impacts for Digitized Ethnographic Archives.
- Authors
PUNZALAN, RICARDO L.; MARSH, DIANA E.; COOLS, KYLA
- Abstract
In recent years, libraries, archives, and museums have made great strides in digitizing and providing online access to ethnographic archives. While these efforts have enabled new possibilities for collections management, content delivery, and user interaction, access to ethnographic heritage collections presents unique assessment challenges because of the sensitive nature of their content, the contexts of their creation, and their sometimes small but vital communities of use. Ethnographic archives often retain links to Indigenous source communities, yet stewards of collections lack specialized impact evaluation and assessment frameworks to account for the complex political and cultural issues that access to such items entails. Current models for impact assessment inadequately track the value of access to digitized ethnographic holdings. As users increasingly access digitized ethnographic materials, more systematic methods to assess the outcomes and impacts of digital access to these collections need to be in place to help institutions and repository managers prioritize what holdings to digitize and how to do so ethically. In response, this article draws on a year-long study with large non-Indigenous institutions and their staff to identify and discuss six areas of meaningful impacts - knowledge, professional discourse, attitudes. institutional capacity, policy, and relationships - that can be used to frame and examine the outcomes of digitizing ethnographic archives. We begin by presenting an overview of ethnographic archives and their users and uses. We then identify relevant frameworks, methods, and published studies on impact assessment of digital resources and show how they are inadequate for ethnographic collections. This is followed by a discussion of the methods for our study and each of the six areas of impact, as well as potential indicators for each area. Finally, we present the implications and challenges of these areas of impact for demonstrating the value of digitized archives beyond quantitative metrics of clicks, likes, and downloads.
- Subjects
ARCHIVE acquisitions; ETHNOGRAPHIC analysis
- Publication
Archivaria, 2017, Issue 84, p61
- ISSN
0318-6954
- Publication type
Article