Introduction

Some 25 years after the world wide web was born at the CERN (http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/birth-web) in Geneva in 1993, it should come as no wonder that most of the information we process today is produced and used in digital form. Capable of reproducing most of the pre-existing information carriers such as texts, pictures, sounds and films, the digital format is progressively replacing many of the former media. This process implies there will be profound changes in the daily practices of both scholars in the field of humanities and information professionals.

Understanding changes induced by the influence of digital media within professional practices remains a critical task. As Michel de Certeau reminds us, there is more to learn about the evolution of scientific disciplines through the analysis of the conditions of their production than through their scientific outputs (1975, 65). This chapter proposes to shed light on the current changes of practices within the humanities and to outline several recommendations for a closer collaboration between humanities scholars and information professionals in order to achieve a thoughtful use of digital media.

The first part of the chapter introduces the digital humanities, a field of practices situated at the crossroads between information sciences and the humanities, which has experienced a rapid growth in the past few years. It discusses the origins and scope of digital humanities, as well as the question of its definition. The close association between digital humanities and information sciences is also highlighted.

The second part shifts the focus from digital practices to professional collaborations and analyses the evolving relationship between researchers and information professionals under the influence of digital information systems. Recent changes in the use of libraries and archives are discussed, drawing from recent surveys about information practices among humanities scholars.

Finally, in the third part are recommendations on how to improve this relationship in a digital environment. It draws on previous points in order to propose some ways to introduce a closer collaboration between information professionals and humanities scholars within the context of the digital information landscape. In particular, it advocates the benefits of enhancing the visibility of documentary mediations in online environments.

While the previous chapter concentrated on tangible artefacts of KIM, this chapter looks at practices centred around people. These are perhaps the most difficult to define, implement and gauge success. As the first chapter described, KM originated as a people-centred area of study and it is only over time that it has become associated with tangible systems. Indeed, some consider the knowledge held inside people's heads to be essentially unmanageable. This area of KM, therefore, largely concerns methods of encouraging the exchange of knowledge between people. This might be in a more or less formal manner and as far as the practice of KM is concerned may have different levels of inter - vention. Most of our examples will be around online collaboration spaces, but we also address face-to-face knowledge-sharing.

In this chapter we discuss a range of different approaches to sharing know - ledge, broadly defined as communities of practice. These are groups formed in the course of negotiating their way through a shared part of working life, nonwork endeavour or common interest. They are considered to share a language, common practices and behavioural shortcuts, but may be unaware that they constitute a community of practice. As a knowledge manager, you may have a more or less formal role building, facilitating and recording such communities and their outputs. While the community of practice may already exist, you can add value by organizing events, providing and curating online tools, and helping to bring knowledge and learning from the community back into the organization.

Why would an organization support a community of practice? It is a cheap way (staff time allowing) of enabling staff to learn from each other and share infor - mation, not requiring classroom sessions, professional trainers or lots of one-to-one information transactions. The benefits are more than this: we potentially learn more in an ongoing process of engagement with our peers than from a one-off session within which knowledge is organized into discrete packages. This is not to say that classroom sessions are not valuable, but communities of practice provide a constant means of reinforcing and developing formally acquired knowledge and skills, and putting them into practice. Moreover, formal training represents an official version of practices, systems and skills.

Introduction

There have been many participatory approaches to digital cultural heritage in recent years, with a groundbreaking work on archives by Sexton and Flinn (2013). There is particularly prominent interest in the applications of crowd sourcing (Ridge, 2014) and citizen science in this domain (Dobreva, 2016). One area where participatory approaches could be particularly beneficial is oral history research; the advantage of appealing to the wisdom of the crowd is to attract greater numbers of contributors to the collection of histories on a particular topic. Involving a wider network of informants should ideally allow more content collecting and refining of information through the memories of participants.

Oral history projects can follow different designs and one recent trend is to involve interviewers as voluntary contributors after providing sufficient context on the research and interview process. Volunteers can also help in transcribing and curating interviews. In some cases, people from the same community or even family may be involved since they have the advantage of knowing the interviewee, which can be beneficial for topics where there are no areas of sensitivity. In other cases, spreading the word in the community can help to identify potential contributors to the project.

This chapter explores two case studies on oral history projects implemented in two countries (Ireland and Malta) and on different topics (rural place names and tattoo art history). In Ireland, six teenagers aged 15 or 16, from two schools, applied to take part in the project within three weeks in November 2014. In Malta, university students were involved in the various stages of the project, from holding and transcribing interviews to populating digital content on an institutional repository.

Looking at two case studies helps us to better understand the dynamic of early involvement of volunteers and to explore the potential benefits for projects that require a high level of dedication.

Participatory approaches in archives

Staff in memory institutions are interested in involving members of the general public in contributing to the creation and/or refinement of digital content. One of the popular ways of engaging citizens is crowd sourcing; in 2011 Johan Oomen and Lora Aroyo proposed a typology, which looks at several ways of engaging citizens: through correction and transcription, contextualisation, complementing collections, classification, co-curation and crowdfunding (Oomen and Aroyo, 2011).

This chapter looks at techniques to capture organizational legacy knowledge. The approaches taken in the book so far all do this to some extent, but this chapter highlights the risks of unconsidered staff turnover and what you can do to prevent corporate knowledge disappearing. We look at two approaches to ensure that the most valuable staff knowledge and information does not disappear over time.

In his 2002 article, Wilson said ‘whatever businesses claim about people being their most important resource, they are never reluctant to rid themselves of that resource (and the knowledge it possesses) when market conditions decline’. The modern workplace is characterised by a high staff turnover, frequent restructures and in some organizations an internal competition and blame culture. This all has the potential to lead to knowledge disappearing from organizations without anyone noticing. Moreover, in an environment where employees struggle to keep their jobs, and have to reinvent themselves with every restructuring, there is little motivation to share professional secrets.

Efficient HR managers design job roles to be interchangeable. This enables staff to transfer easily when vacancies become available and allows natural wastage without redundancy payments. But it does not encourage sharing. If I am not identified by the special knowledge I bring to this job, or have acquired during its course, what motivation do I have to create a legacy? Temporary and zero hour contracts exacerbate the problem of knowledge loss. Staff in those circumstances may be perpetually looking for another job, even where they feel a commitment to the organization they currently work for. It is rare for managers in many organizations to take a considered approach to the problem when staff leave. And where they do, they usually concentrate on positions in the upper echelons. Corporate hierarchies conceal the fact that essential corporate knowledge can be embodied in quite junior people. These people leave organizations without much attention.

Recognition of this problem is not new. Beazley, Boenisch and Harden's book Continuity Management predicted a demographic time bomb in the USA as the baby boomer generation retired, taking their expertise and knowledge with them (2002, 9). They identified what they called ‘knowledge continuity’ as essential for organizations to maintain their competitive advantage (51–3).

Introduction

Social tags are often considered as another type of metadata, since they provide information about the resources for users’ needs (Kim et al., 2010; Passant et al., 2009). In addition, its social aspect allows tags to become a form of collective knowledge. The term folksonomy, a term created by combining ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy’ to indicate a user-driven collective taxonomy generated from tags (Vander Wal, 2007), also reflects such perspectives.

As simple keywords assigned to a resource, tags have some limitations as resource descriptions. First, simple keyword tags without any context encounter problems with ambiguity in their semantic meanings (Guy and Tonkin, 2006; Passant et al., 2009). A good example of this limitation is homograph terms such as apple, which can mean a fruit or a company. Second, because the tagging systems allow users to input free form text as tags, the tag terms may vary in their forms and selections. This could be related to the use of synonymous terms such as car and automobile, where users can select one or the other for the same concept. Another example could be related to different tag term forms. For instance, user-generated compound tag forms such as semantic web, SemanticWeb, Semweb, semantic-web and so forth, are considered heterogeneous in tagging systems and when computers process tags (Guy and Tonkin, 2006; Passant et al., 2009; Syn, 2014). In addition to these cases, there can be additional problems of tag variations that occur due to human errors such as misspelling. Third, a folksonomy does not have a concrete structure; unlike the hierarchical structure of controlled vocabularies, a folksonomy is considered to be a flat organization (Shirky, 2005). In addition, depending on users’ contributions, a tag set may change over time, making a folksonomy dynamic (Lin et al., 2012; Mika, 2007). Finally, there is an issue with the use of tag sets, as user tags are dependent on tagging systems (Gruber, 2007; Kim et al., 2010; Mika, 2007). Various types of systems and applications offer tagging features, including bookmarking systems, such as CiteULike (www.citeulike.org), photo-sharing systems, such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) and Instagram (www.instagram.com), microblogging systems, such as Twitter (https://twitter.com) and library online public access catalogue (OPAC) systems, such as BiblioCommons (www.bibliocommons.com).

Users, archivists and their interaction

Almost 20 years ago the famous Canadian archivist Barbara Craig gave the title ‘Old Myths in New Clothes: expectations of archives users’ to her contribution to a conference on archives’ public (Craig, 1998). She provided evidence that there is a risk that archives are ‘condemned by their own methods to fall short in meeting the needs of their users’; she also argued that this is not a new issue, but ‘an updated version of the familiar scenario in which it is assumed that conflicting demands and distinctions exist between select services for an elite clientele and popular appeal and services for the many’. The popular myth that the world wide web contains every possible information enforces the misconceptions about the nature of users and their access behaviours, so ‘it is crucial that the energy behind our concern not dissipate in complaining’, but archivists should accept that ‘the many varieties of myth surrounding information technology contain a core of reality for users and for archives’.

Users follow different strategies

The development of digital environments for offering access to archival information requires considering different scenarios of use. The popular typology of internet users includes two categories – browsers (or surfers) and searchers, where the browser typically follows multiple links mostly for amusement, and the searcher is seeking specific information. Actually back in 1977 when discussing the wider case of information retrieval, Carl Beck introduced three categories, browsers, searchers and reductionists (Beck, 1977).

Carl Beck summarised their strategies and we are providing his description here because it is insightful about not only users’ interactions with digital material, but also the long way digital collections have developed over 40 years.

Introduction

The internet is a unique medium, innovating constantly and, in turn, being shaped in accordance with the technologies, interests and needs of the time. It started with simple content, requiring facility of straightforward search; thereafter it turned into a complex network (social network) with complex content (social content) demanding complex search processes (social search). We have seen the transition from the static web to the dynamic web to the intelligent web. Social networking emerged with the inception of Web 2.0 and has expanded dynamically since 2003, because of both its enormous appeal to users and innovations in technology. Social tagging was immediately accepted by savvy users and gained recognition as an important feature of social networking sites and social bookmarking sites. Additionally, social tagging is a possible solution to improved searching of networked resources and enables users to use tag descriptors to label web content for the purpose of personal and shared organization of information resources (Trant, 2009). This chapter will explore the different types of traditional recommender systems, as well as those for social tagging specifically, their use and effectiveness.

History of traditional recommender systems

Recommender systems emerged during the mid-1990s (Herlocker and Konstan, 2001; Shardanand and Maes, 1995) and were collectively defined as the supporting systems that help users find information, products, or services by aggregating and analysing suggestions from other users (Frias-Martinez et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2010; Park et al., 2012). The term ‘recommender’ can refer also to the degree of information filtering to produce topics or content that users are interested in (O'Connor et al., 2001). A recommender system analyses user preferences, interests and behaviours and generates the potential information, service, or products needed by users (Li, Hsu and Lee, 2012). A recommender system is a technology where items such as products, movies, events and articles are recommended for users (Kordík, 2016). Burke defines a recommender system as one ‘that produces individualized recommendations as output or has the effect of guiding the user in a personalized way to interesting or useful objects in a large space of possible options’ (Burke, 2002a, 331).

Information discoverability in Facebook groups

The progression of the web from a source of static information to a forum for dynamic, socially engaged, user-generated content has engendered a milieu of interaction and immediacy related to communication and information seeking. Popular online social networks (OSN) such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram allow users to communicate and generate content for commun - ication, entertainment and information seeking and sharing. Users as well as visionary developers have helped define these socially driven web tools as constructive and user-friendly.

Since its inception over a decade ago, Facebook has evolved from a communication channel exclusively for Harvard students to a worldwide forum for shared experiences in specialised groups. As Weinberger (2017) noted in Business Insider on 7 September 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, as a student at Harvard in 2004, created Facebook to allow students to discover information about other students. By ‘friending’ another student, one could discover information such as his or her class enrolment and community connections. In viral fashion, more than half of the Harvard student community joined Facebook within a month. Just two months later, students at other academic institutions such as Yale, Columbia and Stanford joined in, launching a global tech company that is now a powerful player in OSN communication and information sharing.

On 3 May 2017 – over a decade later – in a public post to the Facebook (FB) community summarising the 2017 first quarter business report, Zuckerberg, the influential FB founder, announced the company's intent to focus on building community among its more than 1.9 billion users. FB data indicates that over 100 million of its users are members of specialised community groups that have formed around significant issues, interests and concerns, such as parental support, specific illnesses and political and activist movements. Zuckerberg (2017b) described these groups as very meaningful and as an important piece of the lives of people engaged in these communities. In another public FB post – Building Global Community – on 16 February 2017, Zuckerberg (2017a) spoke openly regarding both humanitarian and political influences of Facebook to positively impact the human condition. In turn, he and Facebook have also become outspoken supporters of hot topics such as marriage equality, equal rights and other political and social justice issues.

Introduction

Digitisation and distributed communication platforms are responsible for radical transformations in the social conditions of historical truthfulness, social and collective memory institutions, cultural preservation and cultural retrieval practices, as well as many other fundamental changes. For example, one can hardly compare traditional collections of authentic art works, exhibitions and hard copy catalogues with digital images collections of non-profit initiatives such as Artstor Digital Library (www.artstor.org/), commercial images agencies such as Getty Images (www.gettyimages.com/ creativeimages) and online photo management and sharing applications such as Flickr.com (www.flickr.com/).

Similarly, one cannot compare traditional celluloid and video archives of television stations with online archives of public broadcasters, video-web-sharing sites such as YouTube.com (www. youtube.com/), content that is available through social networking sites such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com, and personal archiving through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Google's Library Project has hardly any resemblance with New York's central public library. The Internet Archive (www.archive.org/) reflects and constructs social memories and (documented) fragments of the past that are notably different from those of the History Channel (www.history.com/), a famous television station offering programming on historical events and people. And – overall – wars, disasters, political events, public affairs, popular culture, high culture, personal items and many other fractions of people's experiences, encounters and lives seem utterly different when they are narrated, contextualised, documented, filtered, preserved and then made accessible via the web.

These are not merely changes in the scope, scale, diversity and attributes of the institutions that are now taking an active role in cultural preservation activities. These are also transformations in the political economy of historical truthfulness – the allocation of resources and powers, economic, technological and legal, which are responsible for shaping landscapes of history and reflections of the past.

On a cold, rainy day in June 2017, I went to hear Richard Ovenden, the Bodley's Librarian (the senior executive position of the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University) speak at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. In his talk, entitled ‘Curating Culture: research libraries in a digital age’, Ovenden spoke about recent efforts at the Oxford libraries to document (then) current events. In particular, he mentioned the campaigning of June 2016 that led to the UK voting to leave the European Union (EU) (in what was sometimes described as the Brexit referendum). In the run-up to the referendum, the Leave the EU campaign had a ‘battle bus’, the brainchild of the Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings. Plastered on the double decker was a large sign that said ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS [National Health Service] instead. Vote Leave.’

On 23 June 2016, after the referendum results were announced, the £350 million figure was declared wildly exaggerated (the Office for National Statistics noted that it did not take into account rebates and payments to the public sector from the EU). Furthermore, Nigel Farage, one of the key architects of the Brexit campaign, noted that any savings would not go to the NHS after all and implied that had never been promised. Even in April 2017, prominent pro-Brexit campaigner and politician Boris Johnson stood by that £350 million figure, but the bus vanished the day after the referendum.

Photos of the bus placard still exist on the web, though, however much its creators would want them to have vanished. The image is also contained within the curated web archives of the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, along with other ephemera and social media around the referendum. Ovenden noted that in spite of difficulties over re-use of digital information and legal deposit in the UK context, the process of web archiving strikes an important blow against those who would try to erase or minimise acts of recent history.

A snapshot of July 2017, a month later: the international news is dominated by concerns about the Trump family and staff's contacts and emails with Russian operatives before the US election of November 2016.