Wednesday, June 27, 2012

anARCHIVE: mock-up of an information retrieval system


The latest assignment for my Masters asked students to create a mock-up information retrieval system (IRS) of a collection of our choosing. It was to take the form of a proposal, and include information on metadata standards, how information about an item (or surrogates in the lingo) is retrieved (such as search, browsing, recall, precision etc) and 10 examples using a wiki or other means to illustrate our IRS in action.

I chose to catalog my zine collection as I'm sure I'll need to do it for Katipo or some other group down the track. It was cool because I got to look at examples of zine libraries around the world and how they cataloged, described and provided access to their zines. I also got to pretend that a functioning anarchist archive in CHCH existed by using a wiki!

Here's my assignment in PDF form, complete with links to 3 example zine collections (Bernard Zine Library, Anchor Archive Zine Library, Salt Lake City Zine Library) and my mock-up IRS, anARCHIVE. I post it because good examples of zine/anarchist archives in practice are hard to find or light on information around how they do things (except for the examples I used, which were great). I also think the metadata fields I came up with are pretty good (although my lecturer suggested I could have used more administrative metadata on when the record itself was created, updated, that sort of thing). Might come in handy for any radical groups out there wanting to catalog their stuff.


View proposal online or download from Issuu:

AnARCHIVE wiki (not an actual archive!)

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