Digital Archives

My work has recently acquired two new photographic printers. As the printer heads need to be used every week to keep them from getting jammed, we were all told that we could get some prints from our collection printed for our office if we knew which ones we wanted. With this incentive, I took myself to the LAC homepage to find some interesting photographs. While there, I reflected upon a theme that we had discussed during the photography class - Archival Encounters. In particular, I reflected upon how the LAC's digital archive of photographs, and the colonial legacy, shaped the way that I encountered that archive.

On the LAC website, there is an option to search through the photographs where you need to select one or several key words. As I was doing this, I really came to understand that I would have to conform to the keywords pre-selected by an archivist who would have assigned keywords to photographs. I was unsure of what these keywords were, and initial attempts to find images of war posters did not yield the expected results. I initially tried searching for what I considered the images to be, "war posters" which only came back with 1 result.

A second attempt, "war poster" without an 's' took me to a photograph with the caption "MIKAN 3396789: Two Canadian soldiers reading a War Bond poster in a ruined village in their lines. December, 1917." Upon seeing this, I realized that I might have been using the wrong term in my search, so I switched the term to "war bonds" which brought up a larger amount of relevant results. In the end, I decided on the following image to be printed: MIKAN 3668563: Our Daddy is Fighting, Buy War Loan Bonds and Help Him Win the War.

Although I selected a few other images that I wanted printed: MIKAN3387419: Tobogganing at the Chateau Laurier,MIKAN 3386153: Girls' Hockey Team, and MIKAN 3192911:

Byward Market in my searching I found myself getting constantly frustrated while searching for keyword terms that I felt were appropriate only to be faced with finding limited results, even when I knew a picture existed. As well, I realized that I had to frame my search terms in particular ways to be able to find images the way that the archivist had categorized them. Often, I would turn to very basic and fundamental key words when I wanted to find a large amount of relevant results, for example, the blanket term hockey which came back with 276 images. Even then, I was unsure if there remained images that I was missing due to my keywords.

This experience is very relevant to the James Opp piece, the Colonial Legacies of the Digital Archive because it brought to the surface how important the archivist's role is in future searches of the digital archive. In the process of digitization, the archivist assigns keywords that must be replicated exactly by the researcher if they want to locate that image. The experience also highlighted to me the fact that the archive is not the 'neutral, impartial observer' it is often made out to be. In order to 'unlock' the digital archive, one must work within the framework that has been created by the institution, something that may require the researcher to put their own ways of thinking aside or else be faced with the dreaded red sentence: No documents containing your search terms were found.