Research Interests Stream of Consciousness Session

Hi, I’m Bridgette. I’m currently finishing my last semester of the MI program in both the LIS and ARM streams.

Let’s give this a try…

I’m drawing a blank… no wait, there’s something there…

My research interests have changed quite a bit throughout my time at the iSchool. I came into the program with the toolset of a historical geographer and wanted to learn everything I could about the praxis of preventing our collective memory from going down “the memory hole”. My internship work has thrown me into the world of academic librarianship and I’ve had a chance to summarize and analyze qualitative and quantitative user experience data. Whether it’s reference data or collated interactions from the personal librarian program, or way-finding behaviours in the library — I’m becoming very interested in the socio-spatial experiences of library users and how those experiences are expressed in both qualitative and quantitative data sets. I find that the notion of library as site of knowledge production to be fascinating and worthy of more study.

Back to my original interest. Some of the courses that I have taken this year such as appraisal, arrangement and description, and A/V materials have brought me back full circle to my initial interests. The memory hole, the topography of that memory hole and the archival endeavour. I’m trying to think about the why of how all of those interests fit into a potential question. Is it the ephemerality of digital objects and the need to develop better best practices and workflows for metadata capture? Is it the recent political-economic moment in Canada under Harper that has curtailed democracy and access to information? Were some of those measures taken before the Harper regime?

There’s a relationship there structuring that memory hole… the erosion of democratic structures of governance and its effect on access to information under Harper; how those structures operate in both a centralized and decentralized manner; budget cutbacks; the intrinsic ephemerality of digital object, particularly of born-digital objects; a resulting inability to capture adequate and robust metadata to fully describe the provenance of objects that support current and future use… uses that are often tied to our notions of democratic citizenship. 

So: How did changes to democratic structures as they relate to access to information and funding for projects that support access to information across the federal civil service change since 1993 (Chrétien) and how did this changing context of governance affect the ability of government agencies in coordination with the NAC-LAC to capture adequate provenance metadata to support the “total archives” mission in Canada?