NYU MA Programs in History

Archives for June 2021

Description and Access Models for Web Archives: Three Case Studies (Celeste Brewer, APH 2016)

Web archiving has gained the attention of both the academic community and the broader public in the past few years, thanks to a series of highly publicized studies of the prevalence of link rot in web-based scholarly journals, and feature articles on web archiving in publications including the New Yorker and the Atlantic.  Web archives are a new and complex documentary form, but a valuable one with an extensive range of research applications.  Yet there is little consensus among cultural heritage institutions tasked with archiving web-based resources about best practices for describing and making available the archived websites in our collections.  The paper explores the diversity of descriptive practices and discovery platforms currently in use, evaluates their impact on access to collections of web archives, and makes recommendations about which aspects of each model might best serve as standard practices going forward.

Case studies of the descriptive practices and discovery platforms implemented by three institutions with varying perspectives on and needs from their collections of web archives form the core of the project.  The New York Art Resources Consortium is a trio of art libraries in New York City which describes its archived websites using MARC records conforming to the RDA content standard, and provides access to them through a customized layer of their shared online public access catalog.  The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, meanwhile, describes its archived websites using the DACS content standard, and provides access to them in EAD finding aids in the New York University Libraries’ archival collections search portal.  Finally, Archive-It—a web archiving software provided by the Internet Archive on a subscription basis—incorporates both full-text search and the Dublin Core metadata schema, and provides access to sites archived by its hundreds of subscribers through a search portal at Archive-It.org.  Many, if not most, of Archive-It’s approximately 400 subscribers use these provided tools as their sole method of description and access for their collections. In that sense, then, Archive-It can stand in for any number of cultural heritage institutions which simply affix their logos to Archive-It’s standard features.

Each approach can be adapted to meet the unique needs of web archives and their users, maintaining consistency with institutional practices in the absence of broader professional standards.  Libraries and archives should strive to integrate their web archives into shared discovery and access platforms alongside descriptive records for other formats of collection materials as fully as resources permit.  Description of web archives should also take into account not only what is present in the archived websites, but also what is absent.  Current methods of capturing and reproducing the contents of live websites are far from perfect, and the information that streaming media, dynamic content, and the full contents of databases are not reproduced in a given archived website is of high value to researchers.  Finally, information about the processes and curatorial decisions which led to the creation of an institution’s web archives should also be provided in some degree of detail.  This information is indispensable to researchers interested in using web archives as datasets, as it allows them to identify and correct for the ways that curatorial choices and technical capabilities can skew the data found within the web archives. 

Web archives have so far fallen short of transforming the information landscape in the way that the live web undoubtedly has.  Yet they can solve many of the problems associated with the live web, from link rot to the ease with which users can erase and rewrite documentation of the past.  Improved description and access models for web archives can help them accomplish these tasks.

Writing Women into History: American Army Nurses in Vietnam, 1962-1973 (Emily Anderson, APH 2019)

For her capstone project, Emily Anderson created a historical fiction novel focusing upon the experiences of four women during the Vietnam War. The piece is a collection of four fictional short stories, each based on a close analysis of oral history interviews from four women who served as nurses at the 7th Surgical Hospital or the 12th Evacuation Hospital on the U.S. military base camp at Cu Chi. Each woman’s lived experience helps render a fiction that addresses important historical themes. The imagined Frances “Bobbie” Meyer, for example, captures the intense sexual pressure and violence women withstood during their service. Mary Hunt’s story recreates the world of Vietnam at war, the overarching military structure, the experience of life on base and life in the field. The pieces are grounded in the historical record and enriched with secondary scholarship on the Vietnam War, the women’s movement, and the socio-cultural fabric of 1950s and 1960s America. 

Mortar Fire Skies is an experiment in this vein, an alternative mode of historical storytelling. It recreates the Vietnam War from the perspective of the American women who served, the approximately 5,000 female nurses of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) who served in-conflict between the years 1962 and 1973. Their Vietnam experience is a reflection of the larger national trends that characterized the American female experience of the 1960s: despite military messaging and minor victories that insinuated equality, women were held by the unforgiving, traditional gender role boundaries under which they had been socialized.

Women were integral to the Vietnam War effort – and deeply impacted by it. Because they were not fighting in the field, female nurses have been denied as having an active combat role in Vietnam. Yet the women who served on frontline bases treated active combat wounds; their bases withstood active combat attacks. The violent world army nurses came to learn, and the violence they directly experienced, meant that theirs was an active combat role. It needs to be understood as such. Secondly, this piece illuminates an American society in transition, as the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s struggled to redefine traditional gender roles and bring women into political and economic parity with men. This is a struggle that continues in our present time. Mortar Fire Skies thus serves a dual national need. It gives current and future generations an understanding of the historical underpinnings that shaped the contemporary fourth-wave feminist movement. Most importantly, it elevates women in to the Vietnam War narrative, writing them into a history from which they have previously been undermined and excluded.

A Living Archive: Folkways Records and Ethnographic Sound Archives (Clinton Krute, APH 2019)

For his capstone project, Clinton Krute demonstrated the ways in which Folkways Records has fulfilled the functions of an institutional ethnographic archives—and by some standards more effectively than those archives—through Moe Asch’s novel business practices, as documented by Olmstead. Founded in 1948 by Moses Asch, Folkways Records not only distributed and popularized a large number of ethnographic recordings over the course of its 70-year existence, it also preserved and documented the cultures of the world and influenced the world of ethnomusicology on a scale that few other private record companies can approach. Though Folkways was decidedly not an institutional archive—at least not until its acquisition by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987— the label adhered to certain standards unheard of in the music industry of the time: including scholarly notes with every release, and maintaining their entire catalog in print regardless of sales. By doing so—and in keeping with its founder’s upbringing among radical leftists and as a member of the Jewish diaspora—Asch hoped to both preserve this material and to provide access for scholars and amateurs, to establish what he called, “a living archive” and an “encyclopedia” of sound.

In the first section of his capstone, Clinton described the story of Moses Asch and the the creation of Folkways, with a focus on the Ethnic Series, drawing attention to the ways in which the label has served the academic community and sought to document, preserve, and make accessible cultural heritage material. In the second section of his capstone, Clinton provided a brief history of field recording and ethnographic sound archives, drawing on the research of the archivists, musicologists, academics, and collectors involved in the creation and operation of these archives. In the third second of his capstone, Clinton provided a detailed overview of contemporary archival description practices for ethnographic audio material, demonstrating the limitations of these practices and showing how Folkways, through its access to commercial markets, offers some potentially fruitful lessons for ethnographic sound archives. And finally, the capstone essay concluded with Clinton highlighting connections between emerging developments in archival description practices and somewhat analogous forms of description and documentation practices of Folkways, particularly the Folkways Ethnic Series. In particular, Clinton focused on two new models—the British Library Sounds’ Archival Sound Recording (ASR) Project and the Association for Cultural Equity’s Global Jukebox—for the archival description and digital repatriation of this material, and emphasize how the story of Folkways might contribute to and supplement these new ways of thinking about archival description and repatriation at institutional sound archives.

Almost alone both in its time and today, this commercial record company (Folkways) operated as an academically and socially influential archive of ethnographic recordings from its first release in 1948 until its acquisition by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, the moment that marked Folkways’ final transformation from a privately owned company into an institutional sound archive. Folkways Records—and the Ethnic Folkways Library in particular, with its focus on documentation of cultural heritage—uniquely occupied an area somewhere between institutional music archive and commercial record label, a place where ethnomusicological recordings are, as ethnomusicologist Rafael José de Menezes Bastos has written, “made public commodities.” Through his capstone, Clinton demonstrated the ways in which Asch’s project has provided an alternative model for description in sound archives, which, along with the increasing dynamism of digital archival description and distribution, might provide more effective methods and strategies for the long-term preservation, description, and repatriation of archival ethnographic sound recordings.