RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS
3 Archiving and Organizing Information
Kathleen DeLaurenti and Andrea I. Copland
Information Organizations
So far, we have discussed research modalities; explored the information life cycle; and defined three kinds of sources to help you plan and organize your research strategically. You are equipped to locate your research in a research-creation modality and articulate potential research questions. This can help you decide what kinds of primary, secondary, or tertiary sources you need and how to map that to the information life cycle.
Next, we cover the ways institutions have collected and organized these resources as well as the different methodologies that music researchers have used to create traditional scholarship. When you understand how information has been collected and organized, you can more efficiently access the resources you need for your work. Being familiar with historical and emerging methodologies benefits musician-scholars in two ways: you will be more efficient when searching for published research and make better informed decisions about which methodologies you may want to use in your research-creation.
Archives and Institutions
“Archive” is a noun and a verb. An archive is an entity within an institution that collects documents and objects of informational value. As a noun, an archive usually contains information that provides evidence about an institution’s history or people. Archive is a verb in the sense that it also describes the work that is done to preserve evidence for posterity and to organize or arrange it in an unbiased way for future access.
It is essential to acknowledge that institutions like universities, museums, archives, and libraries are largely enterprises of Western culture. Advocates for these institutions cite the preservation of—and visibility or access to—information as net positive justifications for their continuation. However, some institutions that deal in cultural heritage also have a complicated history of seizing, excluding, and even erasing valuable information that exists outside of text and artifacts.
Because of this complicated history, we sometimes need to think about primary source evidence that might exist in the information life cycle but may be difficult to find through institutional resources. You might encounter a barrier because of the way that information is described: Institutions have developed practices to catalog information to help make these resources more discoverable. However, those practices may ignore cultural or communal approaches to knowledge production and preservation. A disconnect can emerge when an institution archives a community in one way, and yet that community collects, describes, and preserves its culture in other ways. Resources can become challenging to find; you may need to connect directly with a community to continue your research process.
Another phenomenon that can interrupt your ability to access primary sources as evidence is arc