Ahead in the cloud: A virtual reading room manifesto
Archival research can take place anywhere. We can hunt through archive catalogues on the bus. We can look at scanned images in the park. We can all log on to find our pasts from the comfort of our sofa. Or someone else’s sofa.
What are the implications of this for the concept of a reading room? What is a reading room? What is it for and what does it mean to put it online?
1. A reading room is a service not a place
Reading rooms have several key functions but fundamentally they are a site for provision of a service. A reading room service
· allows users access to collections material in a sustainable way
· facilitates research journeys — users should be able to find relevant material, examine it and locate and access (or request) new material based on what they saw
· supports researchers and fields their questions and enquiries
· provides research guidance (finding aids) in various formats so that researchers can also be helped to help themselves. These resources should be ‘at hand’ while research activities (searching, reading) are carried out. Researchers should no more have to leave the reading room to look at them than they do on your premises
Researchers should, as far as possible, be able to work in the way that best suits them.
As soon as we conceptualise reading room provision as service provision we can see that these functions can be carried out online if adequately planned and resourced. A reading room is a place where active, contextual and highly informed expertise is available to support research and other enquiries. Both virtual and physical reading rooms require staffing to make sure that researchers and documents can come together safely.
Many different things may happen in a reading room — education activities, group working, volunteer training. A virtual reading room is unlikely to be able to precisely replicate all of them. Something may be gained and something will be lost if digital reading room services supplant rather than complement physical reading room services. An inclusive reading room service requires flexible delivery to ensure that the needs of (for example) those without access to digital technology are being met.
2. A virtual reading room is the sum of its parts
Provision of an adequate digital reading room service requires a combination of human expertise and digital systems working together in a planned and well organised way.
This means that, in and of itself, a website cannot be a reading room. A camera is not a reading room. A catalogue is not a reading room. A mailbox is not a reading room. However, each of these things may form part of an integrated service which, taken as a whole, constitutes a virtual reading room.
At the same time, consider what resources that are commonly utilised in your physical reading room are not currently available online. How can these be better manifested online? How can your organisation’s pathways for digitisation be made ever faster, cheaper and more robust?
3. You already have a virtual reading room
The reading room is the site of your reference service. In the past it was the place where a researcher encountered the record through the mediating presence of an archivist. The mediator is now (in the first instance) a digital system or set of digital systems.
A virtual reading room is not a catalogue but your cataloguing platform is and will be one of the central and fundamental parts of your reading room experience. Your catalogue is the place where your users begin to discover and make sense of your collections. Your website is the front door to your archive.
If you feel your catalogue could never provide a rich, reading room-like experience then it is time to begin the process of changing it. Your catalogue must also integrate as seamlessly as possible with the other functions of your virtual reading room service to reduce overheads for you and your researchers.
4. Virtual services should be big, fast and clear
Digital material shares many properties with paper material. One property it does not share is the extreme ease with which machines can examine whole collections rather than single documents. More and more researchers will want to make use of this property of digital archives and a virtual reading room should as far as possible facilitate this. A human will never read your whole catalogue. A machine can — and the results have the potential to transform our understanding of our own collections.
The provision of more digital material also requires the provision of very clear directions around use. If materials are restricted or redacted, users should understand at all times what they are seeing, what they are allowed to do with the material they are viewing and what they are not allowed to do. Content warnings may be required in the case of collections understood to contain disturbing material.
Finally, there is no reason why a clear path for digitisation should not be obvious for every object. This comes at a cost. We should explain transparently that cost and ensure that investment in digitising an item meets it and unlocks that item for future use by all researchers. In failing to do this we actively deny ourselves crucial operating income and needlessly restrict access.
5. A vessel of oil to run the machine
Taking all of this together we would have to conclude that the standard of virtual reading room services today is not very high — perhaps unsurprisingly given we may not have fully appreciated we were running them. The need to provide new access for born digital records (and the associated standards for this) and the experience of COVID closure should galvanise us to assess our virtual reading room provision critically and holistically and make pragmatic decisions about how to improve the experience we are offering. We must locate the pain points for our users and our staff and improve our systems as far as possible to remove them.
At the same time the basic structures of a functional virtual reading room service are present in most archives. If we can better co-ordinate these different moving parts we will be a long way towards providing the digital services the public deserves.
