These media represent the beginning of a
cumulating body of research on the British Columbia poet Audrey Alexandra
Brown, her participation in the construction of national identity in the early
half of the twentieth century, and how that participation changed as a result
of shifts in Canadian media on local and national levels. The two images were
taken from the Audrey Alexandra Brown fonds held in the University of Victoria
Special Collections and the audio file is from the CBC program Rewind.
The first image is a collection of proofs taken at a studio in Nanaimo, B.C in
1935. The second is a scanned excerpt of a letter from Pelham Edgar, a critic
in Toronto, to Brown. The 1939 letter reveals that Brown was asked to read
poems on air but that the CBC found they "had not proper facilities in
Victoria for a nation wide hook up." Edgar also writes that Brown's work
had been recently published into German, suggesting that the print-based
version of her poetry was receiving wider international attention. In the audio
file, host Michael Enright describes CBC Radio's shift in focus toward a more
international audience as a result of the Second World War. The file provides
contextual information on the period through which Brown's poetry began to
receive less attention from literary critics and the general public. Through
further examination of Brown's archival material, I hope to assess the impact
of shifts in media focus on the accessibility of Brown's poetry. 

         It
is difficult to provide all relevant metadata for the archival material without
having spent more time with the poet's archives. Still, I feel the categories
provided by Dublin Core are highly applicable to archival material. I can
foresee trouble with the "agents" fields however. Photographs may
have unidentified creators, or I may have to cross-reference other materials in
order to find out who the creators were. Even in the case of the
"photoshoot" image, there was no identified photographer, although
Brown did provide the name of the studio where the images were developed. I'm
still not clear on where the creation of the digitized version is annotated. I
used two dates in my description: one to state the original creation of the
archival material and the other to state the creation of the digital version. I
wonder if additional metadata should be added to call further attention to the
process of digitizing the media. Should this go in the "Contributor"
field? Perhaps the process of digitizing doesn't change the "content of
the resource" (Hillman) so much as the form, however certainly form shapes
a reader's encounter of the content to some extent. Perhaps I'm not familiar enough
with Dublic Core yet, but there doesn't seem to be a field to represent media
shifts.

         It
was difficult to distinguish between metadata for the 'agents' fields when
describing the audio file. CBC Rewind
basically examines various clips from past programs. If I had more time, I
could list all the hosts as contributors, but if I had more time I would also
ask permission from the CBC and use another clip from the archives. The CBC
makes it very hard to use material from their website, so I had to (in a most
immoral fashion) find this clip through a user who had downloaded the podcast
and reposted it on Castroller. Initially
I had wanted to use a 1936 CBC Archives
clip that spoke to the transition from the Canadian Radio Broadcasting
Commission to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Anyway, the fact that I
wasn't able to use Rewind file from
the source meant that I had to make difficult decisions with regard to the
'source' field and identifier.

            Applicable to the
process of digitizing archival archival material are the issues of materiality
and of enactment. Making digital the contents of Brown's archival materials
removes a sense of their materiality in the archive. In a sense my manipulation
of the scanned images contributes to this effect. I heightened the contrast and
cropped the pictures to make them easier to read. If I go on to provide a
transcription of the written material, I am also changing the way we encounter
these media: facilitating immersion perhaps? As mentioned above, I wonder about
the process of enactment. How can I best draw attention to the process of
digitization as a transformation of the archival experience?

Comment on this page