Archivlo: Digitizing the Archival Research Workflow

Zoe LeBlanc

zoe.leblanc@vanderbilt.edu

Vanderbilt University, United States of America

E. Kyle Romero

eulogio.k.romero@vanderbilt.edu Vanderbilt University, United States of America

This poster describes the development and uses of Archivlo, an application for
improving the archival research workflow and enabling a more
collaborative digital research community. In recent years, digital history has
emerged as a vibrant subfield of the digital humanities community (see
Robertson, 2016; and Weingart, 2016).Currently, the majority of digital history
projects rely on digitized corpuses or community compiled datasets. However,
the archival materials used in these projects represent only a small
fraction of the archival sources that scholars currently utilize in their
research.

Moreover, the proliferation of digital cameras and scanners has resulted in a
wealth of archival material for scholars, but this digitized archival data is
usually scattered across hard drives. To organize this data, scholars currently
either keep notes or re-purpose bibliographic software.

Data management software provide some solutions to dealing with this abundance
of material (such as Devonthink, Evernote, Zotero, and most recently, Tropy)
but individual scholars often must invest a great deal of energy and time
replicating the organizational structure of the archives to make sense of
their research. This siloed approach to archival research makes finding
information about archival collections or other scholars working in the
archives difficult. Ar-chivlo is designed to solve these problems, and create a
more coherent workflow for organizing archival data.

This poster will outline the development and design of Archivlo, from the early
idea stages to our initial beta model. Archivlo is currently in progress, and
the poster will share our experience building a web-based application, as well
as designing a user interface that privileges data interoperability and
flexibility. Archi-vlo is written in Python and Angular, and is fully
opensource on Github. To access archival data, Archivlo utilizes archives' APIs
and web page annotations to allow researchers to find collections. Users are
able to save their archival collection research in their profile, and indicate
whether they have worked in these archives or are interested in using the
archive. This functionality adds efficiencies to how scholars locate and
keep track of their archival research. Users can also export their records to
multiple file formats, as well as other data management software, such as
Zotero andDevon-think.

Additionally, Archivlo enables users to share their lists of visited and
interested in archives, which we believe will help scholars share information
about archives and potentially even form collaborations. For archivists,
Archivlo can also provide data on user interest vis-a-vis usage of their
archival collections. We believe our experience with Archivlo will be of
interest to other digital humanities developers and project managers, as well
as digital humanists who work with archival collections.

Previous efforts to encourage digital collaboration among researchers in
archives have, with a few exceptions, largely faltered, with most of these
projects requiring a high technical literacy to contribute to a database or
extensive time to transcribe records (see Mostern and Arksey, 2016. Moreover,
these efforts to construct large databases of archival data have been forced,
through copyright restrictions, to limit their scope to material that is either
from prior to the early twentieth century or born digital materials). Instead
of requiring large resources to digitize materials or standardize collections,
Archivlo presents an alternative solution to this problem - focusing on how
scholars work with archives to enable more digital and collaborative research.
We believe Archivlo will encourage more productive data management
practices among scholars, and reduce inefficiencies in the archival research
workflow. Much of Archivlo's goals remain experimental, and the opportunity to
present our work at DH 2017 would help us share our progress and consider
future directions for the tool.

Ultimately, we hope that Archivlo can help further the digital humanities ethos
of digital collaboration, and present one solution for using tools to help
foster digital research communities.