Community Informatics Multimedia Archive

My paper with this title was accepted by the Midwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association for their annual meeting in Columbus, OH on October 4, 2009 (wish me luck with a 20-minute summary of the work. This will be a good test of what I learned in LIS 458 Instruction Design). This paper summarizes my findings from a research paper I developed for LIS 530BLE Health Science Information Services and Resources. My objectives were to identify information literacy skills in public health and librarian competency sets and to demonstrate that information literacy skills are being developed in the public health workforce through library-sponsored trainings.

I conducted a literature review which identified information literacy development trainings for state or local public health workers. Three trainings which improved either public health core or bioterrorism competencies were selected. Two tables were created for each training: one illustrates the relationship between training objectives and information literacy skills and the second table identifies the information literacy skills embedded in public health competencies.

My conclusion is that information-related trainings could be much more effective if librarians were involved in planning them. I found that librarians, public health workers and leaders in a minority community identified health issues and created information literacy skills trainings. In another training, the state library and health department used assessment data to teach workers how to use an online bibliographic database. Although librarians were not involved in another state health department training, the event improved information literacy skills. And the really interesting thing is that none of the trainings identified themselves as information literacy trainings although each training met the ALA information literacy criteria: find, retrieve, analyze and use [information].

About 25 of us gathered on a fairly warm and humid August evening to enjoy The Big Neighborhood Supper. Artist and GSLIS grad student Maggie Taylor worked hard all summer to collaboratively organize workshops, conceptualize a group gathering around local food and drink, and produce a meal in a lovely setting. She pulled it off, and then some! Another GSLIS grad student, Susan Rodgers, led one of the workshops with Tom Abrams, about community gardens and foraging. At that event, I learned about purslane and the nutritional benefits of cattails. Other GSLIS grad students brought their produce to share for the meal last night. In Maggie’s back yard, we sat around home-made tables from discarded lumber found in an alley; set with 60-year-old china, vases of flowers from Rachel’s garden; placemats made from photos of local fruits, vegetables, and chickens; decorated with fabric and candles hanging in trees; and sprigs of herbs on each place setting. We all pitched in to prepare the food, and what food! Pesto and bread (thanks, Pekara!), chilled cucumber soup, salad greens with sweetpea currant tomatoes, grilled veggies, vegetable frittata, and half cantalopes filled with mint ice cream and warm plums. WOW. Almost everything was local, grown by the people who came to the meal. The four children, three dogs, and many adults were quite content when I left at 9:30 pm. We shared memories of food production and I met many new people, or got better acquainted with people who have been around as long as I have, but I haven’t talked to much. (Three of us were 56!) Thanks SO much, Maggie and all BNS participants!

I just got in from THATCamp Austin 2009, a program organized in conjunction with the 2009 Society of American Archivists meeting at the University of Texas. I helped lead a really great discussion on digital humanities, digital inequalities and community archives. One discussion I thought was particularly interesting was one about control in a digital age. The point was made that in a post-object digital world community control changes because things can be re-mixed quite easily once it’s out on the open-web. However, I pointed out that copyright is still an obstacle. Who controls copyright is who controls content and this control remains by and large in the hands of large, alien corporations. And the problem is fairly wide-spread. How much community control can truly be exerted in a clearly corporate program such as Flickr? In what cases would this matter for a community archives?

We also discussed digital humanities and digital inequalities. This is something that bothers me. I’m not a big fan of the term “digital humanities.” Why not something like digital humanity? Is there a reason we need this terminology except to mark this new field as clearly tied to the academy? On that note, I must say I am somewhat ambivalent about the fairly stark divide within LIS (at least here at UIUC) between people who look at questions of scholarly community and scholarly issues and those who look at community informatics. On the one hand I fear this divide in research and teaching perpetuates a university-public divide that I am uncomfortable with. On the other hand I recognize that we need some way to reasonably organize ourselves into communities of interest. Much of my thinking these days comes back to interdisciplinarity and collaboration. If anyone knows of any great works on this subject, especially in relation to community informatics, I would love to know of these works.

Finally, we discussed collaborative digitization in an international context. I brought up the fact that there are vendors such as Aluka (now part of JSTOR) and Alexander Street Press that are going around the so-called Global South (i.e. Mozambique, Brazil, various parts of the Caribbean, Timbuktu), digitizing what could be called community archives of these places and then charging research libraries around the world for access to these materials. In other words this digital content is NOT available to all – it is only available to those who can pay for it. One could argue (as the vendors do) that they make almost no money off of this – it is simply the only way they can afford to provide this service. But who is being served? I would argue it is not the communities from which this content comes; rather it is American and European researchers interested in advancing American and European scholarship on the Global South. I have some serious concerns with this model. One of the participants at THATCamp called it library imperialism – I wouldn’t go that far, but it does raise some serious issues about capitalism, libraries. international issues and information policy. I would argue that community informatics should take a stand on issues such as these as they are, in my opinion, symptomatic of the abuses that occur when an increasingly digital “Global North” begins taking what it needs/wants from communities in a “Global South” that lack the digital infrastructure to support these programs on their own. There is certainly a place for discussions of digital inequalities and community informatics around this topic.

What follows are some often rambly reflections on a number of CI-related topics:

On Saturday, July 18th, a handful of GSLIS students from the Society of American Archivists, UIUC student chapter, and the Community Informatics Club, and a few interested non-students from the Champaign-Urbana area traveled to nearby Mahomet to check out the Doris Hoskins Archives on Cultural Diversity, housed at the Early American Museum after the passing of Ms. Hoskins a few years ago. This archives represents a form of a community archives. As defined by Commanet (Community Archives Network), a community archives is defined by the following points:

• the community creates its own archive
• the community has editorial control over its archive
• the community owns the copyright in its archive

This description partially fits the Doris Hoskins’ collection. Although the collection emerged in a somewhat collective manner, it was first largely directed, collected, organized and controlled by a single woman, Doris Hoskins. The collection was acquired by Ms. Hoskins throughout her life, but was especially supported by a partnership with the Early American Museum that began in the early 1990s. The “community” in question is the African-American community of north Champaign, which supported Ms. Hoskins with staff, support for the production of a newsletter and in the creation of exhibits from her collection. People from the community gave Ms. Hoskins their material because they saw here as collecting and preserving, in the words of one  community member, “our stories.” However, now that Ms. Hoskins has passed on the collection has traveled to the Early American Museum, which struggles to keep her legacy alive in the community and to continue to build upon the collection in a respectful and useful manner.

At our first meeting with Cheryl Kennedy, Early American Museum director, we learned about the history of the collection, how it was acquired, the issues faced (including copyright and community control) and brainstormed about how GSLIS students could help further the mission of this archives. Furthermore, how can we make this collection more “collective?”

We will be returning to the Early American Museum on Saturday, September 12th in the afternoon. All are welcome to participate. Our current plans on that day are to on that day begin developing electronic inventories of the collection that can be placed on the Early American Museum’s website, identify preservation needs and identify portions of the collection that can be digitized without worrying about copyright or personal privacy violations. The goal of digitization will be to enable people at, especially, the Douglas Branch library in Champaign access, add to, comment upon and use the archives in a creative way. Possible software for these purposes include Omeka, http://omeka.org/, and Commanet, http://www.commanet.org/slideShow.aspx. Other ideas are greatly appreciated.

In terms of community informatics, a secondary question is how can we collectivize the archives through the use of digital technology. In the United Kingdom, where the community archives movement originated, much of the recent activity in community archives has heavily relied on the use of new technologies to enable community control and direction in a way that the analog world makes more difficult to achieve. For examples of this phenomenon, see the National Archives, UK’s report Community Access to Archives -
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/partnerprojects/caap/,
the blog of the grant-funded project out of University College London led by Andrew Flinn, Community Archives and Identities -
http://archivesandidentities.com/,
the national directory of community archives – http://www.communityarchives.org.uk/,
the Commanet site – http://www.commanet.org/English/Tutorials/WhatIsComma.htm.

Community archives have existed in the U.K., as well as in South Africa and Canada and probably elsewhere, for many years, yet there is a palpable sense that their numbers are mushrooming as digital technology and a somewhat sympathic archival community support their development, funding and resource sharing. Community archives have to a great degree changed the notion of what archives should be and what they should do. In South Africa, a special issue of S.A. Archives journal in 1998 (available through EBSCO) explored how community archives have reoriented the archival profession there. More recently, in the U.K. Victor Gray, president of the British Society of Archivists in his presidential address in 2007 explored how community archives have thoroughly re-orienated the archival profession in the U.K. (found in “‘Who’s that Knocking on Our Door?’:
Archives, Outreach and Community”, Journal of the Society of Archivsts, 29, 1, April 2008).

A new book to be released in August seeks to investigate some of these issues in the American context: Community Archives – The Shaping of Memory. http://www.studia.no/node/5124266. The book is co-edited by Jeanette Bastian who has explored community archives related issues in her story of the U.S. Virgin Islanders’ loss of control over their archival heritage, Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History.

The question we as students interested in community informatics should be asking is how much are we changing and challenging the professional orientation of our respective information fields. Community informatics is a separate field from librarianship science, archival science, etc., which has benefits in terms of disciplinary independence. Yet it has drawbacks in that it doesn’t challenge directly the professions of librarianship or archival science. A more controversial term, such as community archives, has the potential to offer a full-frontal attack on previously unspoken professional biases in the definition of what an “archives” is or could be. Community informatics is often spoken about as a research area, yet how can we also interpret is a professional field. Does community informatics train people to be community informaticians? Community informatics has staked a place for itself within the academy – has it also staked a place for itself within the professional communities? These are some questions that interest me…

For example, in 2006 the Centre for Community Networking Research in Prato hosted a conference with the theme Constructing and sharing memory : community informatics, identity and empowerment (proceedings available for purchase or through Interlibrary Loan) that featured a number of papers related to community archives – including one by our very own Kate Williams!  – http://www.ccnr.net/node/71. This was an extremely important conference, yet I would doubt that it has had much impact on the archival community. How do we both support the development of community informatics as a separate field and nurture its integration into well-established fields of practice?