2024.Mar.28

REPORTS

Report on the 22nd B’AI Book Club
Susan L. Mizruchi eds. (2020) Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age. Switzerland: Springer Cham.

 

The 22nd session of the B’AI Book Club took place on September 26, 2023. B’AI Research Assistant Nozomi Ohtsuki introduced the book “Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age” (2020).

This book aims to re-examine the central issues in digital humanities, such as humanities, libraries, archives, and digital scholarship in the modern era, from both theoretical and practical approaches. The forum hosted by the Boston University Center for the Humanities in 2017, which served as the basis for this book, was attended by a diverse group of people worldwide, including university researchers, librarians, archivists, and experts from various institutions with different backgrounds.

Part 1, “Access,” introduces initiatives to expand access through digital libraries and archives. While digitization has the potential to open up resources to more people, it alone is insufficient, and it is also necessary to remove invisible barriers, such as those between university library knowledge and citizens. It is pointed out that conventional open access, such as digitizing materials and publishing them on the web, has created a situation similar to that in which access to libraries and archives was effectively limited to experts with time and ability. Digitization itself is not the goal; it is essential to provide access in a way that diverse users can effectively utilize. The balance between commercial publishers’ monopolization of academic publishing and open access is also an issue.

Part 2, “Preservation and Community,” deals with cases of decolonization of archives and issues related to community archives. The decolonization of archives showed that effective collaboration among language learners, linguists, and community-based translation teams was achieved in minority language research that departed from imperialist interpretations. Many community archives face financial and technical challenges, and the transition to a digital environment takes work. The need for mutual understanding and mutually supportive partnerships between academic organizations and community archives was also mentioned.

Part 3, “Archival Politics,” addresses the archiving of materials facing political censorship or repression. Collecting and recording as many voices as possible in the public sphere, such as the practice of the Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS) at the Heidelberg Institute for Chinese Studies, has become an essential initiative in recent years as the humanities and social sciences have become more involved with digital technology.

Part 4, “Digital Practice,” discusses the challenges faced by librarians when collaborating with humanities and social science researchers in data-driven research, the problem that librarians’ contributions to knowledge creation are not recognized within the organization, the application of data science workflows in libraries, and the role of librarians adapting to the digital age.

In the discussion, it was mentioned that while digitization has solved the problem of lack of space in community archives, there is a lack of resources to carry out digitization in addition to daily activities and the relationship between the meaning of community archives varying by country and region and the lack of resources. Regarding the digitization of academic materials, it was shown that while academic journals are being digitized under the leadership of publishers, university-owned collections are currently being handled individually by each university, and integrated practices like Google Books have yet to be successful. The digitization of materials itself was also examined. While there are many advantages, there are concerns about losing the material aspects and background information of the materials, and it is essential to conduct activities that convey the context of the materials in parallel with digitization. In addition, there are regional differences in the degree of digitization progress, and data imbalances may likely occur. It was pointed out that past discriminatory values may be reflected in the training data for AI, and there is a need to monitor how algorithms will transform in the future. The possibility of new methods for recording and utilizing contextual and temporal information in digital materials was also discussed.

As digital technology advances, the way academic knowledge is collected, preserved, distributed, and accessed is undergoing significant changes, and there is a need to build a new knowledge infrastructure. In the reviewer’s personal opinion, regarding the application of data science workflows to the humanities and social sciences, it is necessary not to apply them as they are and optimize them but to make modifications from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences while going back and forth between traditional library science and information science. In doing so, it will be necessary for each expert to collaborate with non-experts while utilizing the knowledge of the humanities, social sciences, and information science, paying attention to ethical and social issues, and seeking approaches suitable for the digital age.