Published in Archives and Manuscripts: Binary Trees—Automatically Identifying the Links Between Born-Digital Records
How can we automatically link digital records?
This week marks the publication of my second peer-reviewed paper “Binary trees? Automatically identifying the links between born-digital records”. I invite everyone to read the article and share your thoughts.
Read the paper and some of my own additional thoughts below.
Kaikoura 2016
The background, writing this paper was a difficult one following the 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake. There was a significant amount of upheaval at work as the building had to close for safety reasons and there was a lot of uncertainty about when we would be able to start again. This was first earthquake of this magnitude that I’ve experienced and I know other colleagues struggled too. Still, I was able to use some of the uncertainty to put together some words, and I am reasonably happy with the outcome. I was also able to write a small suite of tools to help advance parts of the paper further.
Automatically linking digital records
As described previously, the paper asks how Archives can take small steps toward better archival description of born-digital records, but the techniques discussed also have implications for sentencing, discovery by the end user, and digital preservation.
I presented extracts from the eventual paper at the ASA Forging Links Conference in 2016; you can see my talk on YouTube.
It took a little while to take this presentation and turn it into something we could publish, but we got there.
I recommend the practice of turning your presentations into something that you can publish if you get the opportunity. It was a great experience trying to formalize my words, and I want to thank colleagues at Archives New Zealand, especially Helen Vaughan-Dawkes and Talei Masters, for reviewing my efforts and helping me shape the final piece. I want to extend my thanks to the Archives and Manuscripts editors and reviewers whose comments all informed the published article.
I’d love to hear what you think. If you’d like to explore this work further or turn some of these ideas into something more concrete, then I’m eager to discuss possibilities for working together.
Thank you in advance for reading!
Sigrid McCausland Award
In late 2018, I was informed that the paper had won the 2018 Sigrid McCausland Emerging Writers Award, with the following note from the journal’s editor:
It feels unreal to receive such recognition for my work, but I appreciate the comments of the editor and the interest taken in this paper. Thank you🙏This innovative article is widely relevant to the archival profession addressing a major challenge of digital records and their archival management and uses.
In this article, Spencer looks at the practical challenges facing archivists in the struggle to capture and preserve authentic, reliable, and unique records as sources of evidence. To identify and protect records in a world awash in duplication, the author outlines eight key record-to-record relationships that archivists must address and explains clearly and concisely several different technologies that may be applied to identify and describe those relationships. This article makes plain the complexity of digital archives and offers pragmatic approaches to support effective preservation.
This article helps to build capacity in the archival profession by communicating simple approaches to identifying links between items, and its focus is on open source tools.
It does a great job explaining the computational terminology and techniques that could be valuable to archivists to enhance the accessibility of digital records.
Additional thoughts
WADL Toronto
The photo in the header of this blog was taken in Toronto when I visited to present on HTTPreserve at the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries conference (WADL) 2017.
View my #WADL2017 poster here.
Karp 2024
Check out St John Karp’s article in Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture from The Interconnectedness of All Things: Understanding Digital Collections Through File Similarity. Karp takes a similar approach but adds perceptual hashing to the conversation. They also take a look at other useful tools developed for their publication to enable archivists to use some of these techniques.
Allison 2024
Tim Allison’s work Embedded Files: Risks, Challenges and Options looks at the risks and challenges of digital files containing embedded objects. Allison is Apache Tika’s primary maintainer, and given its ability to dissect digital objects, it is an important piece of the puzzle described in my paper. 