Continuum informatics is a term used to describe the body of

knowledge, including the array of theoretical models, that

promotes a multi-dimensional understanding of the

transformative interactions involved in creating, capturing,

organizing and pluralizing recorded information over time and

throughout different spaces (spacetime).

This body of knowledge provides a comprehensive series

of principles, concepts and theory that help to inform

continuum informatics and can be applied to explore the

meaning and processes involved in cultural heritage

formation. In cultural heritage the principles and concepts

applied include evidence, recordkeeping, multiplicity,

plurality, and memory.

There is a critical and growing need to understand and embrace the complex memory and archival needs of an expanding, technologically savvy and actively participative society. The need for memory-making and heritage is as diverse as the people and communities creating the stories. Memory-making plays a significant role in the identification of social and cultural standards, as well as values and factors that influence recordkeeping across multiple plural (and contested) memory spaces including personal, community, collective and networked memories. In my research I saw that YouTube was an enabler, facilitator and platform of personal curation, mediation and memory-making, hence providing a space for recordkeeping that supports the ongoing use of records through spacetime - an emergent archive The Mediated Recordkeeping model (Figure 1) represents a framework to support the emergent archive to facilitate, enable and engage memory-making, rather than focus on selection, collection, and protection of cultural heritage within the bounds and custody of the institution. ©"Leisa"Gibbons"2015"

Figure 1

Leisa Gibbons PhD. Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science

Social media archives vs. web archives Storifying &

curating big data

Capturing donated personal profiles

Representing social movements & marginalized communities

Documentation strategies as constructed archive

Ethics, consent & evidence

Social media archives as evidence of research

Record-keeping metadata

Web archiving practices were developed 20 years ago and has evolved into a major field of practice with leading work being done in national libraries and in independent organizations, including the Internet Archive, and the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). Web archiving raises several major and complex challenges for collecting archives, including how to conceptualize web contents and formats, how to preserve content and make it accessible in a meaningful way, and how to design and deliver policy and processes to identify and support the creation, selection and management of a cultural heritage archive (Niu, 2012; Toyoda & Kitsuregawa, 2012). Conversations from web archive scholars over the last 5-10 years also highlight the problems with collecting content over context and the ethical dimensions of web archives (Phillips & Koerbin, 2006; Rauber, Kaiser, & Wachter, 2008; Wu & Heok, 2007). Further conversations in relation to community engagement and participatory archives also form part of a critical conversation about how to create and nurture digital archives that include web content is also relevant to this research project (Eveleigh, 2012; Gilliland & McKemmish, 2014; Labrador & Chilton, 2009).

This research explores personal memory-making practices and systems of individuals who use various social media and other technologies to explore distributed identity, and links between personal, community, identity and technology. This research serves to extend work done by the British Library and others on exploring the digital “upgrades” of manuscript collection traditions and the use of personal digital recordkeeping systems used as tools for curation by visitors (John, Rowlands, Williams, & Dean, 2010; Lee, 2011; Sinn & Syn, 2014). Additionally, there are emerging conversations concerning preservation of whole social media platforms (Marshall & Shipman, 2014), the value of co-curation to deliver libraries of the future (Wang, 2013).

This research explores community recordkeeping in social media and asks if this work contributes to memory-making and how it is achieved. The purpose of this project is to explore memory-making in action and ask communities how they value their records outside of traditional group records such as meeting minutes. This project an opportunity to identify technologies that can help to support memory-making as it evolves. Additionally, this project will examine institutional frameworks related to community engagement in this space, and will provide an opportunity to propose potential solutions to review and renew existing and potential community engagement processes.

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Gilliland, A. J., & McKemmish, S. (2014). The role of participatory archives in furthering human rights, reconciliation and recovery. Atlanti: Review for Modern Archival Theory and Practice,24. Retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/346521tf.pdf

John, J. L., Rowlands, I., Williams, P., & Dean, K. (2010). Digital Lives: personal digital archives for the 21st Century (Research Paper No. 0.1A) (p. 233). London, UK: British Library. Retrieved from http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/files/digital-lives-synthesis01a.pdf

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heterogeneous personal store. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 11–20). IEEE Press. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2740772

Niu, J. (2012). An Overview of Web Archiving. D-Lib Magazine, 18(3/4). http://doi.org/10.1045/march2012-niu1

Phillips, M., & Koerbin, P. (2006). PANDORA, Australia’s web archive: how much metadata is enough? Journal of Internet Cataloging, 7(2), 19–33.

Rauber, A., Kaiser, M., & Wachter, B. (2008). Ethical Issues in Web Archive Creation and Usage-Towards a Research Agenda. In 8th International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW08).

Sinn, D., & Syn, S. Y. (2014). Personal documentation on a social network site: Facebook, a collection of moments from your life? Archival Science, 14(2), 95–124.

Toyoda, M., & Kitsuregawa, M. (2012). The History of Web Archiving. Proceedings of the IEEE, 100 (Special Centennial Issue), 1441–1443. http://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2012.2189920

Wang, Z. J. (2013). Co-Curation: New Strategies, Roles, Services, and Opportunities for Libraries in the Post-Web Era and the Digital Media Context. Libri, 63(2), 71–86.

Wu, P. H. J., & Heok, A. K. H. (2007). Is web archives a misnomer - how web archives can become digital archives? In C. Khoo, D. Singh, & A. S. Chaundry (Eds.), Asia-Pacific Conference on Library and Information Education and Practice 2006 (pp. 298–305). School of Communication & Information, Nanyang Technological University