Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Participatory Archival Research And Development: The Born-Digital Access Initiative, Alison Clemens, Wendy Hagenmaier, Jessica Meyerson, Rachel Appel

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

In an effort to advance the professional discourse around establishing best practices for access to born-digital archival collections, we designed a multi-phase, mixed-methods initiative, begun in 2014, that aimed to identify gaps and challenges in existing access methods and identify plans for how cultural heritage organizations hoped to improve access practices in the future. Over the course of our collaboration, our goals quickly evolved beyond the scope of collecting and publishing a static data set. We were inspired by models of research in practice, participatory action research, and research and development to translate our results into action by using the …