Navigability

One of the overarching themes in the experiences of archive researchers is navigability, or accessibility, of the archive’s holdings. Broadly speaking, documents and artifacts should be

both organized into intuitive categories and easily located with finding aids. The structure of the archive should make links between related items easy to follow and explore. Such “wandering” in the archive is a common and desirable byproduct of primary archival research, but researchers also don’t want to wander aimlessly (Mastrangelo and L’Eplattenier). An intuitively structured archive complements the knowledge of the researcher who does not find material “by accident,” but instead by following informed hunches of what should be available based on what has already been found or referenced in other resources (Gold 43). Similarly, the researcher should also find the keywords of the archive flexible enough to help them produce unique results from different search strings or new research questions, thereby enabling the premeditated wandering that often produces new and helpful results (Gaillet “The Unexpected Find” 150). The WCA archivist maintaining the local archive should work with these needs in mind, providing richly searchable databases that can accommodate both the focused visitor who knows exactly the artifact they seek, and the informed wanderer who will explore a variety of conceptual angles to get to the information they suspect resides within the archive.

To accomplish this, materials included in the archive must be coded with the demands of both browsing and targeted finding in mind. Because each item included will be coded and linked to searchable terms, categorization is key. Grant-Davie explains that in coding data, it is necessary to manage, sort, and simplify information for researchers, enabling them to share patterns with readers, and to provide “researchers with a perspective from which to view the data, so that the coding can directly address their research questions” (272-3). However, in order to render the patterns produced manageable and generalizable, it is also necessary that the “taxonomy must be somewhat reductive” (277). Tirabassi recognizes the same idea from the researcher’s role, citing an archivist’s “principle of categorization” as the goal of rendering the

archive’s holdings navigable through finding aids and categories that anticipate the researcher’s needs (175). Especially helpful to the goals of the WCA researcher –the intended beneficiary of this archive – is that effective coding and categorization enables quick answer-focused searches that externalize the work of the center in simple “nuggets” that are accessible to external

audiences (Glau 296). This responds directly to specific calls for internal writing program research, fulfilling the need for categorization as a means of immediate accessibility.

Alexandra Chassanoff’s study of how historians interact with primary texts in digitally- available archives offers insight into what researchers of a digital archive may prefer in its design and offerings, but also how to help users better acclimate to viewing and using databases of digitized surrogates for real-world artifacts. Chassanoff’s conceptual limitation regarding digital archives assumes a broad database with multiple types of archived topics or categories, which leads to user difficulty in attaining a larger view of exactly how much material is held on a given topic. The author suggests that in a physical archive space, visitors can see the entirety of an archived topic at once, effectively seeing the forest before the individual trees. Chassanoff believes this is preferred because “users require a tremendous amount of information to discern both context and relevance. In the absence of a physical browsing space … it can be difficult to comprehend both the coverage and extensiveness of the resource” (463). However, the archive researcher preferences inventoried by Chassanoff’s study also reveal that digital archive viewers are likely to source non-textual media such as “works of art, oral histories, photographs, sound recordings, film recordings, and video recordings more frequently online than in person,” and that the quality of these digital surrogates is of high importance, both for the reliability and accuracy of the information derived, and in the potential for artifacts to be republished in scholarly work (468-70). This means that the digital archivist must provide a finding aid that

helps the viewer see the limits or boundaries of the holdings as a whole in addition to merely providing search functionality. Additionally, a programmatic archive, which will inherently be limited in scope and topic, and which will be contextually familiar to likely researchers, should alleviate Chassanoff’s concern.

Writing in 2011, when the term “Web 2.0” was often used to describe the ongoing paradigm shift in internet usage habits and expectations from user-as-consumer to user-as- curator and -contributor, Sigrid McCausland explores the potential for users to eventually

supplant the role of the archivist as primary mediator of content. McCausland poses the potential drawback of users finding researchable content solely by digital means without the help of the archivist as a contextualizing agent, but notes the potential strength of drawing on users’ growing appetite to contribute to and strengthen an archive (315). McCausland also establishes the

necessity of designing and, if necessary, modifying digital finding aids and organization according to user needs and feedback (314). Meanwhile, Tiffany Walsh and Christopher

Hollister detail a wiki-based archive project that, while different in content from that of a writing center archive, nonetheless exhibits its potential utility. Working in service to a library sciences course, Walsh and Hollister created a closed wiki system that allowed students enrolled in the course to upload their final projects into a user-maintained wiki space. Like McCausland’s archive researchers, the authors see within their students a “Web 2.0”-informed desire to produce content collaboratively and propose pedagogical strengths of wikis to effectively harness that desire (Walsh and Hollister 392-3). Users expect content to be reactive to their curation wishes, allowing the selection, exclusion, and modification of information streams. The collaborative information generation possible in an archive wiki will appeal to an expanded staff of writing center archivists who inevitably expect some flexibility of design and content.