Making the strange familiar: Bridging boundaries on database preservation projects

Abstract

Archive authorities develop information resources to enable public offices to meet their obligations under their jurisdiction's public records laws. Particular care is taken to ensure that these materials equip their audience with the necessary context and knowledge. Our current work with the evaluation of tools and processes for the preservation of relational databases causes us to question whether good documentation will be enough. In this paper we describe our experiences at the Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), Australia, in developing processes and guidance for the preservation of relational databases. We find that these projects are different to ‘traditional’ transfers, and that their novelty and technical challenges may be made more difficult by organizational and conceptual complexities. We posit that the nature of such projects may require more than the knowledge of that must be done and how it should be done. We reason that these projects may be hindered by the lack of a shared language to communicate across organisational or functional boundaries. Using database preservation projects as an example, we discuss the potential contribution that theoretical perspectives such as boundary objects (Star), transmission theory (Shannon) and externalization (Norman) may make to our development of guidance and how this may assist the support of cross-functional dialogue. While focused on database preservation projects, this approach may be generalisable to other cross-disciplinary and cross-functional work.

Details

Creators

Peter Francis; Alan Kong

Institutions

Date

Keywords

boundary objects; public records; database preservation; siard

Publication Type

paper

License

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 AT

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