This document discusses the evolution of television archives from traditional accessible archives to more participatory archives. It describes how a media student may search for content on YouTube instead of traditional archives due to YouTube's unlimited access and user participation. The document then discusses the "participation imperative" and how participatory archiving allows for decentralization, user orientation, and contextualization of records. Finally, it notes some tensions between traditional archives and more dynamic participatory archives and suggests perspectives like harvesting implicit user participation and engaging communities in the archival process.

1. Television heritage online
From accessible to participatory archives
Eggo Müller
Utrecht University

2. Television heritage online
From accessible to participatory archives
1. A TV scholar’s true story
2. A media student’s probable search
3. Participation and the archive

3. A TV scholar’s true story

7. A media student’s probable search
“Blind Date”

23. • “YouTube has become the standard of what
people expect audiovisual archives to be –
unlimited access and active user participation
have become crucial for an archive’s visibility
and public existence.”
Rick Prelinger in
Snickars/Vonderau (eds.): The YouTube Reader (2009)

24. The participation imperative
Jakob Nielson’s ‘90-9-1 rule’ (2006)

25. The participation imperative
• Democracy
• Arts and culture
• Talent shows
• …

26. Participation imperative
• Traditional norm
• New dimensions in digital culture
• ‘Explicit’ and ‘implicit’ participation
Schäfer, Bastard Culture (2011)

27. Participatory archiving
• “The fundamental characteristics of the
proposed approach are decentralised
curation, radical user orientation, and
contextualisation of both records and the
entire archival process.”
Isto Huliva in: Arch Sci (2008)

28. Participatory archiving
Shilton/Srinivasan (2007)

29. “Dynarchive” (Ernst 2010)
• based on user participation
• aiming at cultures of minorities
• “grassroots cataloguing, folksonomies, social
tagging”
• “on-going, iterative and emergent ontology-
building process”
• “scalable and sustainable participatory
archive”
Shilton/Srinivasan (2007)

30. Tensions
ARCHIVE DYNARCHIVE
professionals crouwd/users
creator-centered user-centered
quality popularity
gatekeeping participation
taxonomy folksonomy
contextualisation appropriation
interpretation consumption
heritage nostalgia
Read-only memeory write-also memory

31. Perspectives
• Harvesting traces of implicit participation
• Responding to users’ requests
• Engaging communities in the archival process
• Creating portals for interactive archiving
• Defining norms for amateur archivists
• ‘Crowdsourcing’ and networked knowledge