She has many years of experience in archival systems development, with the technologies she has been involved in designing and developing deployed into a number of research projects, as well as being utilised in small archives settings. Joanne undertook her PhD at Monash as part of the Australian Research Council Linkage-funded Clever Recordkeeping Metadata Project (2003-06) and received a Vice Chancellor's Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence for her thesis, Building Capacities for Sustainable Recordkeeping Metadata Interoperability. Her research interests lie in the multifarious roles metadata plays in creating, managing and sustaining information and recordkeeping infrastructure and systems, with an increasing emphasis on the nature of archival design.Cultural heritage professionals use descriptive metadata as a tool to manage and mediate access to the memory texts in their custody. With digital and networking technologies exploding the possibilities for capturing recorded memories and memorialising lives, loves and losses, they can, and should, revolutionise our recordkeeping metadata management frameworks. Embracing the 'archival turn' requires relinquishing our role as the dominant descriptive storyteller, but are our current descriptive models and systems a barrier rather than a facilitator of such a transformation? In this paper the author adopts an autoethnographical approach to explore her experience of developing archival systems since the advent of the Web in the mid-1990s. The story involves a range of metadata schemas and models, questioning their ability to enable the design of interfaces to recorded knowledge and memories that tap into and unleash the dynamic capabilities of the new technologies and their potential to reflect a multiplicity of voices. The paper will contribute to the growing body of literature about the role of archival professionals in shaping recorded memory through their standards and practices, challenging our image as merely silent partners and neutral players.
IntroductionMany archivists are all too aware of the enormity of the challenges facing the profession in this digital and networked information age. In two decades rapid evolution of Web and other information and communication technologies have transformed the Internet into a ubiquitous, pervasive, information infrastructure, embedded in our working, social, public and private lives. It has exploded the possibilities for capturing recorded memories, tracking activities and memorialising lives. Discussion and debate of our role in this new paradigm, of the sustainability and scalability of our systems and processes,