Media and the Messengers: Writings on Digital Archiving in Canada from the 1960s to the 1980s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing largely, but not exclusively, on The Canadian Archivist and Archivaria, I trace the development of digital archival practice and thinking in Canada from the 1960s to the 1980s, starting with early experiments in computerized finding-aid creation and the establishment of the Public Archives of Canada’s Machine Readable Archives (MRA) Division. I pay particular attention to trends in the development of computing technologies and their use by office workers. Particularly in its early phases, this is often a story of voices from the margins. Early MRA Division manager Michael Carroll characterized digital archiving as a media specialization, a variation on textual, paper archives. Despite high-profile boosters such as Jay Atherton and Hugh Taylor, the Canadian archival mainstream remained focused on paper-based records and archival practices, even as inexpensive and user-friendly desktop-computing systems began to appear in contemporary office environments, including archives, during the 1980s. In a second article in The American Archivist 79, no. 2 (Fall 2016), I take the story from the 1980s to 2011. RÉSUMÉEn puisant largement, mais pas de façon exclusive, dans The Canadian Archivist et Archivaria, j’expose le développement de la pensée et de la pratique en matière des archives numériques au Canada entre les années 1960 et les années 1980, à partir des tout premiers essais de création d’instruments de recherche informatisés et l’établissement de la Division des archives ordinolingues aux Archives publiques du Canada. Je me penche surtout sur les tendances dans le développement des technologies de l’informatique et sur leur utilisation par les employés de bureau. Il s’agit souvent de voix qu’on avait marginalisées, notamment lors des premières phases. Un des premiers gestionnaires de la Division des archives ordinolingues, Michael Carroll, caractérisait l’archivage numérique comme une spécialisation liée à un support documentaire, une variation des archives textuelles, sur papier. Malgré l’appui de personnes très influentes comme Jay Atherton et Hugh Taylor, le courant dominant en archivistique canadienne est resté fixé sur les documents sur papier et sur les pratiques archivistiques qui leur sont propres, en dépit du fait que des ordinateurs de bureau peu coûteux et conviviaux ont commencé à faire leur apparition dans des environnements de travail, y inclus dans les centres d’archives, au courant des années 1980. Dans un second article dans The American Archivist 79, numéro 2 (automne 2016), je poursuis cet examen pour la période entre les années 1980 et 2011.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".