Wicked maintenance
Maintenance is often stereotyped as an activity involving hardhats and screwdrivers. Academic literature reveals a slightly wider view of maintenance with material covering the maintenance of buildings and physical infrastructures, but also digital systems and domestic labour; adding mops and code to the image of maintenance. The maintenance in these papers is either discussed a semi-clinical way using a lot of field specific jargon or the papers discuss the unequal treatment maintenance/domestic/service labour receives in society. The literature which discusses the former is often based around digital systems [ref.], while the latter highlights the unequal treatment of female and/or immigrant domestic workers and home makers [see this literature]. Literature which discusses the maintenance of archives and/or heritage sites similarly focusses on either the technical aspect of archival maintenance or the lowly status of archivists as maintainers [reference]. While there is a discrepancy in how these two bodies of literature discuss maintenance they all agree that the aim of maintenance is to keep things stable [ref.]. However, neither offer a general understanding of maintenance or consider all the maintenance needed to keep something like a heritage organisation or a community archive running. In other words it does not view maintenance in terms of the wicked problem.
My research revealed that [the maintenance of oral history access] is unquestionably a wicked problem. This section uses the example of oral history [??????] access to illustrate the wickedness of maintenance by first looking at how the evolution of access as a concept has led to a necessity for adaptive maintenance within oral history repositories. Adaptive maintenance is a form of maintenance which alters and updates a structure to better fit its environment [ref]. There are two areas of access which have required adaptive maintenance: the practical aspects of a structure, storage and catalogues etc., and the ethics of access. This analysis will be succeeded by a discussion on how the same technologies which have altered our idea of access have also changed the nature of maintenance work adding to the wickedness of maintenance.
From shelves to servers
Disclaimer this is about access not creation of recordings, so it does not cover the adoption of recording technologies
Doug Boyd finishes his chapter in the book, Oral history and Digital Humanities, with an anecdote about his daughter coming across a box of cassettes and not recognising the analogue media. After Boyd explains what the tapes were and how they were used, she simply replies “I just want to click on it to listen” [p. 95]. This is an excellent example of how developments in technology affect the idea of access and also the shape of the physical structure. Where before you had to go to a record shop to buy a CD, cassette, or Vinyl, now nearly all music is available to you via the comfort of your phone. Similarly, you had to travel to an archive to access recordings, whereas now increasingly oral histories and other archival material is expected to be available online (especially after the Covid-19 pandemic). The idea that access should be instant has resulted in the structure of oral history repositories moving from shelves to servers.
Just like how a plumbing infrastructure connects clean water to humans, the oral history structures connect the oral histories to those who wish to access them. The general aim of this structure is to grant access to oral histories and it is the task of maintenance to ensure this access is sustained. However, as Boyd observed what is meant by access has changed a lot due to the rise of the internet and other digital technologies. This means those who maintain these oral history repositories have to maintain a concept which is constantly evolving. I class these actions as adaptive maintenance because the structure is updated to fit society’s new idea of access.
[what is adaptive maintenance and where did it come from] It is not an innovation but the inevitable result of a revolution outside of the field of oral history. [disclaimer that this section is about the adaptive maintenance in terms of technology not the ethics surrounding it which I will address later] The overall aim of the structure and the maintenance to sustain access does not change with the move to digital. The switch to a digital structure includes: the digitisation of the oral history recordings; the creation of a digital structure; and the development of a new maintenance tasks.
The digitisation of oral history consists of making a digital copy of analogue recordings. It is an ongoing operation, since not all newly recorded material can be assumed to be born digital and not all analogue recordings have been found. My audit of National Trust recordings which had not yet been catalogue by the British Library contained a wide array of formats including CDs, cassettes, MiniDiscs, and a digital file type I did not recognise [annotation]. My meetings with National Trust staff occasionally led them to remember the existence of a box of cassettes buried in an office cupboard somewhere [final workshop annotation]. For the foreseeable future digitisation will be necessary to maintain the structure of oral history repositories. Since the move to digital systems digitisation has become another maintenance task for those who work within these oral history structures.
Alongside the digitisation of analogue material the entire structure also needed to move on from carbon paper and index cards. [more references on this] ][calm systems]
In his paper, Messiah with the Microphone, Rob Perks notes the “painful and protracted” move from analogue to digital at the British Library. He writes about adaptive maintenance activities such as the acquisition of a digital management system and the development of a new accessioning system. [diagram of how this changes things] Digitising analogue material also becomes part of this new system.
These changes in the structure also alter the maintenance needed to sustain access. [as that guy said when you invent the train you also invent the train wreck.] The adaptive maintenance leads to a change in the day-to-day maintenance. As Perks also notes, in addition to the creation of a digital structure the staff also need to be trained in data management – the new form of day-to-day maintenance. [why is data management day-to-day maintenance.] It is important to note this new form of maintenance does not entirely replace the previous forms of maintenance, since the analogue materials are rarely destroyed after digitisation, they are simply added to the existing list of maintenance tasks [p. 327].
The change in society’s idea of access – “I just want to click on it to listen” – has led to a mass transformation of the oral history structures and the maintenance required to sustain access. This change in access has not only influenced the systems which create access but also the feelings we have around access. As Almut Leh writes “the digital representation of original documents has considerably promoted their dissemination and this their visibility.” [leh p.173].
Digital technology has propelled oral history into a completely different world of data management. This is evident by the changes in the structures, as discussed above, but also in the ethics, laws and guidelines that were developed in reaction to this change in the concept of access. In addition to digitising analogue recordings, creating a digital management system and learning new forms of maintenance, those who are maintaining oral history structures now also need to rethink how they classify and handle material. However, unlike the structure where the move to digital has logical steps (even if they are difficult to execute), the classification of material is more challenging as many laws and guidelines that surround this new form of access were not specifically designed for oral history and are do not apply on a global scale. The maintenance of access to oral histories therefore involves those who maintain the access deciding what laws and regulations apply to their materials.
The management of the ethics of oral histories is a form of adaptive maintenance because it involves doing work which changes a system to fit within a new environment. To understand how this adds to the wickedness of maintenance I will first explain how this expansion of access has given us new laws and regulations on material in a more general sense focussing on copyright, data protection, and sensitivity. Then I will explain the opportunities and obstacles of applying these new laws and regulations to oral histories.
[summary of copyright]
Many of the large tech companies that are developing AI have been accused of scraping material from the internet without asking permission of the creators. The tech companies are facing several class action lawsuits and the outcome of the lawsuits could again affect how we share information. However, at this point in time many of the archives will have already been scraped.
Outside of oral history what personal information can be collected has become especially controversial with the rise of social media. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2016 led to the creation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was originally implemented by the EU in 2018 and later adopted by the UK after its formal exit from the EU in 2020.
The third area of ethics is the management of sensitive content. This is not particularly linked to the rise of the internet as morality outcries and the management of morally dubious or harmful content has always existed. However, due to the ease of access through the internet there are people who worry about children or vulnerable adults coming across “triggering” material. The continual management of content is not necessarily a legal matter, although this might change with the creation of the Online Safety bill in the UK.
This is where things get tricky because as I have already mentioned these laws and regulations are not made specifically for oral history. As Star writes by making classification you are also making an outside. Classification is a part of the structure that needs to be maintained therefore the shaping of classification is part of maintenance.
The ownership of oral history and materials in general has changed a lot over the decades as the internet has made sharing and copying material a lot easier. For the time being, in the UK and most of the West an oral history is currently understood as a recorded performance, and therefore the performance, i.e. those speaking on the recording hold copyright over their voices. If a recording is to be used those recorded must sign their copyright over to the relevant party. Importantly, this rule of copyright goes for every recorded oral history, even those that were recorded before this law came in. This is why during my placement at the British Library I conducted a copyright audit of the collection and it clearly showed a developing understanding of oral history and copyright. [summarise BL copyright audit]. This audit and the work of obtaining the missing copyrights is adaptive maintenance. The laws have changed and now work needs to be done to continue legal access to oral histories. However, when it comes to the future of the ownership of oral history AI has made it more complicated. For now the full effects of AI on oral history are not completely clear, yet there are still precautions that can be implemented which I will discuss further in a later section.
However, GDPR was not designed for oral history, which means the framework does not fit perfectly as what is considered ‘personal data’ and what is considered important historical knowledge of public interest is subjective and it is also not a universal regulation. GDPR does however give guidelines on how to handle personal information even if what you are handling does not adhere to the legal requirements of the regulation. ???[insert section on how the effect of GDPR on archives and how very confusing this has been]
Selective maintenance
The change in our idea of access is slow. It is more an evolution of a habit. The change in access and the work needed to maintain the changing idea of access is an example of how certain infrastructures become taken for granted. (think zoom, sat nav, online shopping.) The taken for grantedness of the structure and the labour needed to maintain leads to an additional dimension of wickedness in how we treat something like maintenance that is taken for granted and does not not offer a concrete output. This subtle changes means leads to a certain for grantedness, like water coming out of the tap and historical material being available.
This for grantedness makes it invisible and invisible things cannot be measured. Brand and star with infrastructures and break downs
This has led to resources not being given to this type of work. And this in turn has lead to control being relinquished.
Development is king in this capitalist world. And as I demonstrated in the previous section the digitisation of a system has not led to less maintenance work but more. This in combination with the obsession with development means puts a lot of pressure on time. I saw this clearly during my time at Archives at NCBS. Some maintenance has garnered some interest. Digitisation is a frequently funded endeavour. However, as ia Said in the previous section digitising is not a one time occurrence. Interesting people will give money for the process of digitising but not obtaining copyright.
Because this system is taken for granted and is invisible and not fully quantifiable less money is offered. This is nothing new as Keels was demostrating the same concept in her manifesto. The consequences for archivist often means thy fall back onto volunteer labour or hope labour. I know this because I had to do this work. This is however a vicious cycle as […] observed that then teh work is delighted to the even lower status of volunteer work.
This squeeze on resources, in particular time and money means their is little room for archives increasingly the dependance on external parties and off the peg systems. The direct drawback of these off the peg system is firstly they are not very repairable and cannot rarely be tailor to specific needs. This move from digital has, as I already mentioned in the explanation of the infrastructure, removed the human labour that used to fill in the gaps with the analogue infrastructure.
The uniqueness of wicked problems means it requires tailorable materail]
Some tasked have become easier to complete but the development has also had great consequences on how this sub-infrastructure can be maintained. The adoption of digital technology has closed off a lot of the physical sub-infrastructure to those who are part of the human sub-infrastructure. This means those within the human sub-infrastructure cannot monitor the physical sub-infrastructure for signs of decay, neither can they tailor it to fit their unique situation. They are also at the mercy of obsolescence which can occur at any time; software can be updated and a file type can become unusable overnight. This however is being challenge and some autonomy might be won back in the future through campaigns like the “right to repair”.
In addition this push towards using off the peg systems arguably limits innovation. Having things which do not fit within the prescribed standards presents us with new ways of looking at our standards. Within this frame maintenance becomes a form of innovation something I will discuss further.
A notably more devastating consequences of the outsourcing of the One of the large digitisation efforts was done by the British Library, Unlocking our Sound History. However, recent events with the British Library have also shown the downfall of digitising material, as the hack which occured in 2023 has resulted in audio material still not being available [date]. This does not include the analogue material but in order to search this material you need a catalogue which is also still not available.
The maintenance must therefore evolve to keep up with the changing concept this includes updating their structures and finding ways for their material to fit within new classifications that are wide and general. However, even though everything from the concept and its required maintenance are changing, the human experience stays the same or at least becomes for-granted exceptionally quickly – I just want to click on it to listen. This for granted or perceived unchanged state renders the work invisible, which leads to cuts to resources and a large focus on production in a late stage capitalist world. The squeeze on time and money has forced many to delegate their systems to outsiders including their maintenance.
Conclusion
Maintenance is wicked because it must keep things stable, but what it keeps stable might be a continuously evolving concept. Now I have established maintenance is a wicked problem I wish to propose a new term – wicked maintenance. There is no difference in the properties of wicked problems and my proposed term of wicked maintenance. The difference lies in the approach to “solving” them (solving being in quotation marks because one can never truly solve a wicked problem or wicked maintenance.) Rittel and Webber do not truly offer a concrete method of solving Wicked Problems. Since the publishing of the paper, design has adopted the concept but frequently left out certain elements forcing mainly on simultaneous problem and solution development. I find this problematic as it misses some of the essential properties of wicked problems, often squeezing them into Bailey et al. have already discussed how the term problem is obstructive and offer the terms “situation” and “opportunities” as replacements [ref.]. In the following section I will demonstrate using my case study of the National Trust and Seaton Delaval Hall, how this new term of wicked maintenance shapes both how we understand the situation and develop opportunities.
Another disclaimer
I recognise oral historians who create oral history repositories from scratch do not have to contend with this current evolution in access. However, they will have to contend with any future interpretations of access as well as the obstacles to maintenance created by digital technology, which I will discuss in a later section.