Demographic

Age: 35
Gender identity: Her/She

Race: Indigenous Métis heritage

Class: Professional

Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious): Franco-Columbian raised Catholic

Education: Dual Master’s Degree in Archival and Library and Information Studies; UG U Victoria Major History, Minor Art and Design

Language: French, English, Michif-French

Personal responsibilities: 2 children, 4 and 8

Location: Relationship to Lower Mainland (from here, were from here, from elsewhere). Grew up in Port Alberni. Attended UBC for Masters of Archival and Library and Information Studies, stayed in Lower Mainland.

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• IIIF – Mirador 
• Archival Platforms – AtoM, Collective Access

Brief Biography

Joie Davoren is an archivist at XXX public archive. She is a Libra (creative and practical), born in September of 1987. She has two children aged 4 and 8. She grew up in a Métis/Franco-Columbian community in Port Alberni as Port was encountering significant fluctuations in the lumber industry in a boom and bust cycle. San Group sawmills are currently expanding in a new lumber boom. Her background and the industrial history of her hometown has imbued a deep sense of the value of history and the importance of archives as memory keepers. These interests drove her to an undergraduate degree in History and graduate learning in archives and information. She dabbled in the arts as a child and took a minor in design.

Her parents supported her engagement with both cultures, including artistic exploration, fluency in both French (attending Catholic French language school) and Michif as well as English. She continues to volunteer with both communities and has engaged them in accessing archives and contributing to archives.

She has strong archival research skills and technical skills, but is less confident in the latter. She is supporting her daughters to learn coding skills and picking these up through mentoring them as well as in taking professional development courses in computational design when she can spare time from her busy professional, volunteer and family life.

She has a series of goals in wishing to access the Crossing Fonds eco system. She hopes to better support clients who wish to access fonds and digital objects across collections; she hopes to improve her own research as an archivist, finding efficiencies and serendipity; she hopes to offer better digital interfaces to a wide range of users.

Character description

Joie Davoren is a skilled archival researcher and archivist who has significant technical skills. She is most confident about her archival knowledge and research capabilities and has collaborated on academic research and resulting publication; has been called upon to teach archivists and student archivists best practices in archival search, research and association, as well as annotation tools where she has specialized some skills and design. Joie is very generous in communicating knowledge and supporting colleagues and community members.

She is protective of members of the Metis community and to a lesser extent, but still so, of the Franco-Columbian community, feeling that archives have not reached out to these communities as partners and will tend to function as a mediator for members of communities accessing materials.

She may hold back on expressing technical challenges because she does not want to be marginalized as a woman if she faces challenges. This is unfortunate as her technical capacity is beyond most archivists.

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: Joie grew up in a family with two strong heritages that were points of pride, Métis and Franco-Columbian. Her family had worked in the lumber industry for many years and had seen the impacts of globalization and technology change, making many of the wood processing facilities in Port Alberni obsolete. With support from her mother’s Métis side of the family she engaged in cultural activities from an early age and learned Michif – both Southern region and French. She attended Francophone schools and is fully bilingual. Her interest in archives stemmed from her love of both cultures, a sense of the importance of keeping these alive in current times and in the historical record. She undertook an undergraduate degree in History at Simon Fraser University and then a degree in archives and information studies. Of particular personal concern is retaining the history of Michif, in order to support the training efforts of the Métis Nation of B.C. She is encouraging communities to deposit their archives in appropriate repositories under OCAP and CARE principles of Indigenous oversight. These include the rich media archives of Métis Nation of B.C. which includes photos, films, videos, documentations of ceremonies. She is also encouraging the B.C. Francophone association to build an archival strategy.

Community affiliations: She is an active member of the Métis Nation of B.C. She is also a volunteer with the cultural organization Conseil Culturel et Artistique de la Colombie Britannique. She was a supporter of the successful Supreme Court challenge by Francophones in B.C. demanding equal financial support for Francophone education.

Represented in archives: Métis people are represented in a wide range of records in the Royal BC Archives. UN BC (University of Northern BC) has collected an oral history archive of Métis elders. Union of BC Indian Chiefs holds genealogical records of relevance. The Métislab at University of Ottawa provides a gateway to records across Canada in many archives. https://dadp.ok.ubc.ca/ The Royal BC Archives holds records describing the activities of Francophone associations in the province.

Professional affiliations: Association of Canadian Archives; SIS for Indigenous Archives (SISIA) ; Archives Association of B.C.; University & Colleges Archives Special Interest Section (UCASIS); Digital Preservation Coalition.

Access needs and mobility: Needed to work from home during COVID and although children are in early childhood education and school now would appreciate at home access.

Motivations

Why: Professional practice as an archivist requires supporting clients while strengthening the capacities and relevance of archives. Understands need for interpretation and reinterpretation as a Metis and Franco-British Columbian and having grown up in a city where the lumber industry transitioned dramatically. She believes in the power of archives and historical interpretation and reinterpretation in building knowledge and healthy communities, children and youth. She is also a curious, self-motivated person who wants to see archives retain relevance as we continue to move into the digital era of endless information.

Frustrations

Barriers: She can’t search collections by topic, specifically since she is looking for underrepresented and marginalized communities, she has to find evidence of Black people represented in the fonds and collections of largely white donors and collectors. She often wonders why archivists don’t add extra subject-based tags or metadata that can pull all of these items together, and finds the few instances of AtoM that do have subject taxonomies, aren’t helpful to her search and are still too broad. She understands that most things in archives do not get described at the item level due to time, budget, etc. but she is frustrated that it often takes twice as long to do these kinds of projects because she can’t immediately find results like she would in a library catalogue.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: Workstation, laptop with enough memory to download and drive desktop programs, 16 Gigabyte memory, external drives to manage legacy media 5.25” floppy disk drive; 3.5 inch disk drive; Floppy disk controller card; Optical media drive: Memory card reader; External hard drive.

Software: AtoM; Collective Access; IIF Mirador; Triannon (Fedora4); FromThePage, Scribe (2.0), Scripto, Transcribus; Annotator, Annotorious; ADOBE design suite; HTML tools; visualization tools within archival tool suite.

Network connectivity: Excellent at work; 5G at home. Weak in some of the communities she works with outside of Lower Mainland.

Experience with archival tools: Experienced with both AtoM and Collective Access; Archives Unleashed (before it closed), Community Owned Digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR) listed tools and used a number of annotation tools; image tools (IIIF Mirador). Experience in researching many archives, national and international and testing their navigation and tool strategy. Took design courses in university and visualization, some comfort with coding and in visualization design offerings from standard archival tools. Very familiar with OCAP and CARE principles which she sees as tools.

Experience with archival frameworks: Master’s degree. Knowledgeable about the OCAP and CARE principles.

Attended Indigenous knowledge architecture and metadata workshops. Social ecology of vulnerable media, Vulnerable Media Lab.

Comfort with learning technology: Would describe herself as midway comfortable with some coding capacity.  Supporting her two daughters in Canada Codes so has non-work exposure to coding. She may underestimate her technical skills in comparison to her peers.

Goals

What do they want to do: She undertakes work as an archivist, archival researcher and designer. As an archivist she wishes to serve members of the public, researchers, students, community archivists and archives to find resources in the archive where she works. She also wishes to seamlessly send them to related fonds, or even documents in those archives. She would love a “generous interface” that is attractive and visual, that would allow users to explore the archive if they do not know exactly what they want but encounter potential fonds or objects of interest. She wants to have an easy means to identify copyright (or for the user to do so). She thinks it is ironic that AI systems like GAN3 will be able to do this while humans struggle to access the data/information that they need.

She has learned some of the annotation systems as the communities she serves could add detail and critique to existing description. She would like users to be able to curate collections of materials, arrange and describe these and export for teaching, community use or publication. She would like to keep a record of these annotations as part of the archival material’s interpretation. She needs to be able access records in French, English, Michif-French, and Michif-Southern. Would like translation software to be well integrated into archival search. https://dictionary.michif.atlas-ling.ca/#!/help

As an archival researcher her role is to effectively find archival materials wherever these are located for a given topic she has been asked to research. Here efficiency of finding aids and the ability to move seamlessly across archives which still keeping a record of provenance is important. As above she needs a sandbox to organize materials.

As a designer she collaborates with community members and archivists and interprets archival materials. She also opens interpretation to the public on the sites she creates, for better, and at times for worse, requiring moderation. She would like to edit the commentary that is received and add this as a record to the archive. She would also like to be able to crowd source ancillary materials and place these in relation to archival materials on her sites and potentially migrate these to archival collection. She seeks to build web environments that allow rich digital exploration of archives.

As a member of two marginalized communities (one with significant archival presence – Metis) she wishes to create effective access for teachers, students, community  members, governments, industry partners, to current archives. She wishes to support the growth of interpretive materials and the archives themselves.

What relationship do they want to the archives: They have two relationships to the archives. She primarily is an archivist, archival researcher and designer.

The second is as a member of two historically  marginalized communities. She wishes to collaborate actively with these communities to deposit records in appropriate institutions and protect the records, likely with a licensing agreement. She hopes to engage community members with existing archives to use them for community based cultural and historical activities.