So my final day with these fabulous librarians can be summarised as engaging with our cultural heritage.
All of the workshops today and the visit involved discussions about archives and how to preserve cultural heritage. Cultural heritage is both tangible ~ artworks, manuscripts, artefacts, clothing, machinery AND intangible ~ oral traditions, performing arts, rituals and craftsmanship. Why is this work so important? It has value for individuals and societies and it evolves through our engagement with it.
The role of libraries
- Acting as local/regional memory hub
- Making resources available through digitisation
- Making resources visible
- Long-term presentation
The challenges include financial and economic and changes in technology.
So the main actions from today are to let people know about the availability of these online collections.
- The Koç University Suna Kıraç Library digital collection this includes photography, theses, dissertations, soundscape, maps and plans.
- The architecture and design archives of SALT research
We learned about the way some people are exploring how to help visualise big data. Two leaders in this field are Aaron Koblin who is part of the Data Arts team at Google and Mitchel
l Whitelaw who is involved in visualising the cultural heritage collections in Australia. Mitchell Whitelaw’s TED talk begins by exploring how limiting the search box is when trying to find information on websites.
Our visit was to the Ottoman Archive in the Sadabad neighborhood of Kağıthane municipality. The following information comes from the official page of the Turkish Cultural Foundation. “…the archives were called “Hazine-i Evrak” which literally translates as Treasury of Records. The archives are estimated to hold more than 150 million documents. Only about a quarter of them are yet classified and computerized. The Ottoman archives are open to all researchers of the world although there are practical difficulties in gaining access due to the sheer volume of material and their age going back many hundreds of years. Today it is estimated that about 32 million records are accessible to all researchers, 20 million of which are in registration books and 12 million as separate items.”
We were given a tour of the public museum and then taken to see the private archive storage area which is so large they need bicycles and golf carts to move the documents around. We also visited the document restoration and digitisation area. I am not sure that our students would gain a lot from a visit to the archive other than to discover some of the deep historical significance. They certainly would need someone who can translate from Turkish to English.
