Emergent archives and crowdsourced narratives: two development stories from the Queensland State Library

Abstract

This paper suggests and connects two ideas: First, that digitising collection objects creates new objects in the form of the digital records, which can then form the basis of emerging archives in patterns of public use and interaction. These emerging archives then become a powerful vector for community participation and decentralised authorship of historical and cultural narratives. As such, they deserve to be collected, archived, and made public themselves, which may require new archival strategies. Second, I suggest that digitising non-material objects such as audio-visual materials allows us to examine new ways of describing and cataloguing historical material, by using narrative as metadata. This use of narrative description as part of the essential cataloguing of objects is also of use in organising and understanding community contributions to catalogues and descriptions. Narrative metadata is one of the particular affordances of digitised archives and collections, and can be used not only to strengthen community engagement, but to generate new, archivable historical material in the form of public narrative contributions. The confluence of these two ideas is apparent in collections like that of the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, which houses community object-archives in the form of home movies, photos, and other materials collected from or donated by the public. I explore these ideas through two recent projects at the State Library: the Corley Explorer, and my own work as 2019 Mittelheuser scholar-in-residence, exploring sound as historical material.