Browsing by Author "Wickner, Amy"
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Item Archival Workers as Climate Advocates(2024) Wickner, Amy; Shilton, Katie; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Real-life examples of climate response under material constraints capture the risks facing archives, records, and archival workers amid environmental change, and the factors that complicate climate action. In this dissertation, I sought to understand how climate, environment, and ecology shape archival workers' experiences, practices, and perspectives on the future, including their norms and expectations for making change. I used three interconnected methods: a critical review of six decades of scholarly and professional literature; a literary analysis of archival practices in seven climate fiction texts; and interviews with 13 archivists concerned about climate change. The core argument of this dissertation is that forms of slow violence – Nixon's term for harm that “occurs gradually and out of sight” – produce unresolvable double binds, which catalyze archival workers into a community of climate advocates. This research finds that archival workers are trying to pursue principled work in conditions that prevent them from doing so – not only the material limitations of work sites, but also political obstacles to taking climate action. They develop politically expedient strategies and tactics in response to local circumstances, while using public statements and campaigns to extend their advocacy across the field. As climate advocates, they oscillate between positions as insiders and outsiders in the field, never settling in one stance from which to effect change. While they share a commitment that archives matter to climate response, complexity and contradiction hold them together as a community of advocates. Two key points of disagreement lie at the buzzing center of this community: first, whether archives are primarily resources or obstacles to climate action; and second, to what extent archival climate responses should align with or resist power relations that organize the state of the field (and the planet). There's ample knowledge in the archives field of the significance of climate change, the environmental impacts to and of archival work, the need for archivists to respond to the crisis, and methods for responding. However, such answers make little difference in everyday change-making, if they don't also face head-on the material conditions of archival work and the political relations that determine and reproduce those conditions.Item Getting to Know FRED: Introducing Workflows for Born-Digital Content(2015-06-04) Prael, Alice; Wickner, AmyItem Getting to Know FRED: Introducing workflows for born-digital content(2015-10-09) Prael, Alice; Wickner, AmyPresentation from the MARAC conference in Roanoke, VA on October 7–10, 2015. S6 - Digital Archives: New Colleagues, New Solutions.Item Personal Digital Archiving at the Public Library(2017-04-21) Wickner, AmyPublic library programs and services increasingly bring personal digital archiving and do-it-yourself digital conversion into public spaces. What are the values and impacts of such resources? What role, if any, does public memory play in these personal practices? This poster reports on findings from interviews with District of Columbia Public Library patrons and staff about their experiences with these emerging spaces and resources.Item Using the Memory Lab: Values, Impacts, and Discourses(2017-06-08) Wickner, AmyPersonal digital archiving is how individuals accumulate, organize, store, and preserve digital possessions in their personal lives. New initiatives like the Memory Lab at the DC Public Library increasingly bring DIY digital conversion and preservation practices into public spaces. In order to study the values and impacts of such services and the discourses they activate, I interviewed 13 library staff and patrons about their experiences with personal digital archiving resources at DCPL. Interviewees emphasized values and impacts such as access to resources and the library's role in supporting digital literacy, as well as obstacles to participation including the difficulty of learning new skills and technologies. A critical discourse analysis of one interview reveals additional discourses at play: personal digital archiving at the public library can be valued as a resource for managing (having power over) change, a means of re-situating identity, and a vehicle for (re)imagining the future. This research contributes to our understanding of the narratives and attitudes that shape emerging personal digital archiving practices.Item Web Archiving and You(2017-06-08) Wickner, Amy; Archer, JoanneWe propose an interactive session on web archiving: why it matters, how we do it, and how we can do it better. Web archiving has now been in practice for decades and is relatively well-established in libraries, archives, and museums, but there are many under-explored areas of research and practice. Web archives have been used for teaching, scholarly research, journalism, e-discovery, and art, but remain "emerging" as a source of data. The UMD Libraries have maintained a Web Resources Collection Program since 2009 but how we accomplish this work is always evolving. In this interactive session, we'll frame the landscape of web archiving today, both at UMD and beyond, and introduce issues and opportunities we might take on in the future. We'll also recruit participants to envision how web archives can play a role in their librarianship and act as a resource for the library users they know best. We hope to glean information about a community of potential stakeholders that can help inform next steps for our work on web archives.Item A Work in Progress: Improving Labor Practices in Digital Libraries(2019-06-11) Wickner, Amy; Caringola, ElizabethLabor sustains cultural heritage and yet it is undervalued across libraries, archives, and museums (LAM). LAMs furthermore normalize contingency through practices like using short-term funding to create short-term positions in support of long-term programs and services. Conversations about labor practices and workers’ well-being in LAM often frame these issues as individual concerns. However, the impacts of LAM labor practices spread beyond the growing number of undervalued, invisible, and contingent workers that characterizes this field. In academic libraries, for example, workers with job protections (such as non-contingent faculty status) face mounting workloads as they find themselves unable to support and retain talented colleagues. These protected workers may also find it difficult to scale down their units’ responsibilities, even as undervalued and contingent workers depart. And when library workers depart or become burned out, what becomes of libraries’ ability to sustain access to information, teaching and learning, and high-quality research collections? In this session, we’ll discuss our recent work with the Digital Library Federation Working Group on Labor in Digital Libraries, Archives, and Museums (https://wiki.diglib.org/Labor), which focuses on two research areas: foregrounding the experiences of contingent and precarious workers; and developing a research agenda for valuing labor. We’ll briefly review each research activity in the first half of the session and devote the second half to discussion with participants. This session will be interactive but we hope you’ll stay!Item Writing the Docs Honestly(2018-08-16) Wickner, AmyIn this presentation, I reflect on the centrality of documentation to digital preservation work and – drawing on work by Jennifer Douglas, Sara Ahmed, and the Write the Docs community – propose four guidelines for writing more "honest" documentation.