Speech at the international conference Archives, Access and AI: Working with Born-Digital and Digitised Archival Collections con l’intervento dal titolo Socializing the Archive, London, Loughborough University, 15-17 Jan. 2020. Abstract: How can we give greater access to archives currently closed to the public? What are the best ways to involve donors of archives, and work with them in an active and collaborative way? These are some of the key questions that archivists, researchers and curators at CSAC have been asking during the last years. CSAC is a research centre of the University of Parma, which started its activities in 1968. Right from the start, it concentrated on assembling a collection of fine art, photography, architectural drawings, design, fashion and graphics, just by donation, as well as organizing exhibitions and publishing catalogues. Soon it started collecting and preserving not just artworks but entire archives of Italian artists, photographers, architects, product, graphic and fashion designer. Since 2007, it has been based at the Valserena Abbey, a medieval building just a few kilometres from Parma, and It is divided into five sections – Fine Art, Photography, Media, Project, and Visual Arts – containing around 12 million single items. This institution, which can be considered unique in the Italian panorama, has always operated as an archive and has never had a cluster of digital platforms, until 2015. Since then a permanent exhibition space has been opened inside the abbey and the centre decided to open a website, social networks profiles and several other digital platforms, with the precise goal of animating the archive and documenting the activities and research. I worked as a fellow researcher, inside a digital humanities team, to develop strategies for these new communities, to make them central to the life of the research center, alongside the public of researchers and visitors that already knew CSAC, consulted its archives, worked on exhibitions and loans, read the books and visited itsshows. The goal was mainly listening to these very different group of people, giving them access to digital contents (and to new physical spaces), while keeping them updated with the huge amount of information contained inside the archives and that the archives generate every day. This proposal aims at discussing how to Socialize the Archive, presenting strategies and models developed for a specific case study to make its collections accessible, while revealing the overall complexity of the exhibition and archive activities.

1. Marco Scotti
research fellow
Università di Parma
IUAV,Venezia
Socializing the Archive

2. Social Media and the Archives?

3. CSAC, an archive and research centre of the University of Parma
for the study of visual and design culture in Italy. Now also a museum.
www.csacparma.it

4. Use social media to help deliver specific marketing, learning and
participation goals – don’t do it for the sake of it.
(Imagemakers 2011,8)

5. The changing relations between museum, art practice and the archive, as a place and
expression of the individual or collective memory.
(Merewether, 2006)
the role of the archive:
private, intimate and institutional?

6. regardless of whether the archive is composed of print, photographs, film
and/or digital media, the technologies used to organize, search and share
documents have taken over the purview of the Foucauldian state, with the
crowd acting as the control mechanism.
(Dekker 2017)
Old contents in a new contest?

7. …from the physical building or location, to the gathering of
documents in these spaces, or the more conceptual response of
process-bound information that refers to the way documents (or
records) are created, structured and recorded as part of working
processes and by which they can be queried and probed.
(Horsman 2009)
what is an archive?

8. Animating the archive
we started identifying clear objectives…
redefine CSAC as an accessible archive and a new integrated museum system
create an accessible digital platform to inform the public, share contents and activities and
make everyone aware of the heritage and patrimony of CSAC
learn from interaction with users
integrate all the platforms and channels
exploit the opportunities offered by digital tools to return the complexity, in particular of
research and didactic activities.
create dialogues between archives and collections
keep the contents always at the centre of our attention

9. …applying them to different social networks
Social media are ultimately about engagement, dialogue and the creation of social capital.
(Pett, 2012)

10. How can we give greater access to archives currently nearly closed to the public?
What are the best ways to involve donors of archives, and work with them in an active and collaborative way?
and questions….

12. https://www.csacparma.it/ricerca/

13. Wikipedian-in-residence

15. the distinct points of view of the archive producer, the archive manager and the user
cohabit, but also integrate different policies and requirements, as is happening ever more
frequently in the new dimension of digital resources, beyond canonical definitions of archive,
collection and museum.
re-thinking the strategies and involving the people who were working on the archives

16. Collaborations between archivists and scholars need to address the entire cycle of born-digital
archives – from donors to end users. Archivists have long recognised the importance of
involving donors – for example, to understand the organisation and content of the archive
(Jaillant 2019, 299)

17. while the archivist has always occupied a multifaceted role as scholar, editor, publisher, steward,
and collaborator, archival work in the digital age has further blurred these roles.
(Clement, Hagenmaier & Knies, 2013, 112–130)

18. Consider digitalization programs and digital strategies
Do not replace the archive materials, enhance them
Not just reproductions, but challenges on how to make data and physical object work
together
Digitalization alone does not solve any problem.
Accessibility is not the only solution, if a community of potentially interested people do not
know something exists or do not know what to do with it

19. models

20. Archive that tweets…
https://twitter.com/cooperhewitt
80% of the Smithsonian collections have never been seen by
anyone

21. https://metalabharvard.github.io/projects/curarium/
Curarium is a collection of collections,
an “animated archive” crowdsourcing
annotation, curation, and augmentation
of works within and beyond their
respective collections.

22. #museumweek

23. collaborations

24. collaboration with a digital agency:
Aicod

27. campaigns

28. working together with partners

29. exploring new possibilities…

30. We should begin to see all documentation as intervention, and all
archiving as part of some sort of collective project. Rather than being
the tomb of the trace, the archive is more frequently the product of
the anticipation of collective memory.
(Appadurai 2003, 16)