In “Digitization: Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should” I found the theme of provenance, particularly of importance. I agree with the sentiment that participators in this adult magazine were unaware that they would one day be included in an archive available on the internet, a distribution much wider than they expected.
Initially, I thought “Perhaps making this available offline within an academic setting for scholarly research provides a context for the work that doesn’t exploit the subjects or stray too far from their initial expectations of distribution?” However, who is to say that this needs preservation? Who made the decision that this even has epistemological relevance? Where are the voices of the community which the content was initially created for? Here, the archivists failed to acknowledge the community which would stand to be affected by this, both the intended audience and the participants.
In regards to one of the “setbacks” of citizen genealogy, as mentioned in the article by Jarrett M. Drake, there is little accountability when it comes to the validity of information. I don’t see this as a problem. If the information in an archive is curated by those who hold ownership over the artifacts which affect their own community, does it matter what is a truth or mistruth? In instances such as these (as I have come to find out through my own genealogical research) sometimes, especially for marginalized people, the stories we tell ourselves have a greater level of validity than the “truth” itself.
Thanks, Tresson! I appreciate your acknowledgment of the archival collection’s multiple publics — both those represented within it, and those who’ll likely use it — and the need to address their diverse, perhaps opposing, needs. And your comments about truth — particularly, what constitutes “truth” within a collection curated by and for marginalized communities — resonate with Ann Stoler’s discussion of the ways truth is operationalized through archival conventions in the colonial archive. In both cases, truth is situational, contextual; it’s produced.