Rhetorical Responsiveness: Responding to Literacy Narratives as Teachers of Composition - by Cynthia L. Selfe and the DALN Consortium
This understanding is encapsulated in a movement known as Archive 2.0 (Palmer, 2009), which represents a “fundamental shift in perspective” that “privileges the user and promotes an ethos of sharing, collaboration, and openness.” As Palmer continues,
In ‘Archives 2.0’ the archive is potentially less a physical space than an online platform that supports participation. In this potentially radical vision, users can contribute to the archive, engage with it, and play a central role in defining its meaning.
Archives shaped by this 2.0 perspective are participatory in their nature and sites within which “both archivists and users collaborate to build the archive itself” (Palmer, 2009). The Archive 2.0 movement suggests “ways of interacting” that are not “specific to historical records” and that feature not only digital openness and accessibility but, as Huvila (2008) adds, variations of “decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and contextualization of both records and the entire archival process” (p. 15). With this as background, we can say, I think, that the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) could be considered an example of Archive 2.0 thinking. It is, for example, an archive which is publically available online to anyone with access to a computer and to which any individual can contribute whenever they wish. Further, the DALN as an archive is composed by users' narratives through a metadata system that can be described as a folksonomy. Individuals choose to attach, or not attach, their own metadata to narratives, and they are not limited by a controlled vocabulary created by librarians and archivists as in more traditionally structured collections. This approach means that the contributors shape the archive in fundamental ways through their choice of metadata descriptions.
Since the term ‘Web 2.0’ was first coined in 2004, it has become a weighty signifier, a shorthand for an entire set of transformational processes that are now accelerated by the rapid evolution of technologies where users increasingly become the creators, and not just consumers, of content....The archival profession itself has been a late adopter of ‘2.0,’ a fact often decried by an (arguably) new generation of archivists, but the growing number of Archives 2.0 projects certainly points to a growing trend.
(Palmer, 2009)
Archive 2.0 projects feature “decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and contextualization of both records and the entire archival process”
(Huvila, 2008, p. 15)