AN INITIAL PROPOSAL FOR THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE
DAILY ROUND ARCHIVES
In
partial fulfillment of requirements for
LS
605A Administration of academic Libraries,
Spring
1978
Dr. Y.
Suzuki
By
Diane
N. Nahl
May 2,
1978
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION?????????????????????????????..1
History of the
DRA?????????????????????????????1
Purpose of
DRA??????????????????????????????1
Organization of the
DRA??????????????????????????..3
II. PRINCIPLES AND THEORY????????????????????????...4
The Problem of Unit????????????????????????????..4
The Librarian as Social
Psychologist?????????????????????.6
The Problem of
Accessibility?????????????????????????7
III.
SPECIAL
PROBLEMS???????????????????????????.7
The Copyright
Issue????????????????????????????.7
The Privacy
Issue?????????????????????????????.7
The Problem of Organization and
Funding???????????????????8
IV.
SUMMARY
AND CONCLUSION???????????????????????.9
CHART 1:À PART A:À Organization
Chart of the U.H Library???????????..10
PART B:À Organization Chart of the DRA??????????????.11
PART C:À Description of the DRA Departments???????????..12
PART D:À Annotated Outline of DRA Departments??????????..13
CHART 2:À PART
A:À The Categories of the Self on the
Daily Round????????15
PART B:À Sample DRA
Classification Scheme????????????.16
PART C:À Examples
From the DRA?????????????????24
FOOTNOTES???????????????????????????????39
BIBLIOGRAPHY??????????????????????????????.40
I.À
INTRODUCTION:
History
of the DRA. This
paper summarizes the ongoing project I am involved with in connection with my
joint study of Social Psychology and Library Science. The project requires
establishing an archives of natural history data collected by students in
Social Psychology 222 and developing plans for making the data accessible to
current and future students.
My
association with the project started in Spring 1975 as a student enrolled in
Professor James? Social Psychology 222 course. Subsequently, I served as a volunteer
in all phases of the collection and maintenance of the data bank. This paper is
my first attempt to formalize my notes and discussions on this project,
referred to as ?the DRA archives.?1 The expression ?daily round? as
used by Sociologist Erving Goffman (Goffman, 1974) was adopted by James and
Gordon (1975?78) and extended to refer to their attempt to systematize natural
history observations.
The DRA
archives constitutes a depository that citizens may contribute to and use in
studying themselves and the community. Professor Leon James is a social
psychologist and psycholinguist in the Psychology Department at the University
of Hawaii, and Dr. Barbara Gordon, an educational linguist, is president of
Transactional Engineering Corporation and a Visiting Colleague in the
Psychology Department. These two scholars are developing new methodological
tools for studying the daily life of persons in order to provide information on
the actual biography of ordinary people in the community. To obtain this
information, to serve as a repository for it, and to catalogue it will be the
purpose of future DRA libraries.
Purpose
of DRA. The object
of the DRA archives is to provide a data bank of records of individuals for the
study of community. This rationale matches the traditional basis for the
institution of archives, as stated by Burke and Shergold (1976:239,239): ?It
could be said that the keeping of archives constitutes a significant aspect of
man?s experience in organized living? and, ? ? archives can contain information
which extends over the whole range of human activity.?
The
information in the DRA archives is in the form of discourse segments deposited
by students as their ?witnessings? on their daily round. The data are expressed
in discourse segments because that is the medium through which the community
naturally operates. Thus, the discourse segments deposited become the units
to be classified and catalogued. However, as is the case with archival
matter, standard library cataloguing systems (Dewey Decimal and Library of
Congress) are not applicable since the context for these systems reflects and
upholds the subdivisions of traditional academic disciplines (Schellenberg,
1965; Perotin, 1966). Hence, the categories of entries making up the subject index
are constructed by reference to a cataloguing scheme that serves a specialized
use in the community and for which users must be trained for literacy through
long schooling. The information in the DRA archives by contrast deals with the
witnessings of a single individual going about his daily business. The reports
he submits and which form the content of œthe DRA are spontaneous
productions of discourse. These texts are then to be categorized by the
librarian, forming a ?Subject Index of the Daily Round? that is constructed by
reference to a cataloguing system that is descriptive of the spontaneously
encoded (or reported) discourse segments of text. But where is one to find such
a system?
The famed
?Murdock Files? (Human Relations Area Files or HRAF), developed in 1937 by Yale
anthropologist George P. Murdock, seeks to present a concise account of the
social, economic, and political conditions of various countries around the
world through building files of data from the writings of scholars and researchers
on a representative sample of the world?s cultures. As Murdock states in his
preface to the fourth edition of the Outline of Cultural Materials
.ÀÀÀÀ . ., the categories have come to represent
a sort of common denominator of the ways in which anthropologists, geographers,
sociologists, historians, and nonprofessional recorders of cultural data
habitually organize their materials.?
The HRAF
thus represents an outline of the cataloguing practices (conventions) of the
members of those disciplines in recording their field observations or
presenting their theoretical interpretations; these are then culled by HRAF
researchers and presented as the HRAF Outline. This Outline is
meant to be ? . . ., a comprehensive inventory of the known cultures of the
world, both historically and contemporaneously.? (Murdock, 1967:vi) It is a
comprehensive inventory of the recording, observation, accounting practices of
anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and geographers in their behavior of
processing and reporting on culture. The HRAF thus represents a specialized
?ethnosemantic glossary,? that is, a mapping of the ways in which authors in
such disciplines report and organize their observations and descriptions. I
intend to study further the organization of the HRAF and to adopt whatever
principles are applicable to the DRA, but it is clear at this stage that I
will have to evolve a new system suitable for reflecting the ordinary citizen?s
spontaneous productions of discourse text under the motivation of giving a witness?
noticing about the self on the daily round. I discuss this issue further under
?The Problem of Unit? in section II.
Traditionally,
archival matter, ?records, organic in character? (Schellenberg, 1965:33;
1966:24) is not arranged by classification scheme but rather is arranged in
order to reflect the origin or source of the material. This refers to the
principle in ?archivology?3 œprincipe de la provenance? or œrespect
des fonds?. Arnold J. Van Laer (in Schellenberg, 1965:44) explains:
?The principle
demands that documents shall be classified, not like books, according to subject
matter, but with reference to the organic relations of the papers, the files of
each body or office being kept by themselves.?
This
principle serves an historical function in avoiding dispersal of records across
subject areas. The DRA material has a rationale and function that are amenable
to both an historical and a taxonomic classification scheme. For the historical
function, it may be of interest to examine an individual?s biographic record
longitudinally over successive contributions by the witness. The catalogue and
retrieval systems must thus allow the recovery of all of the entries for one
person as well as all of the entries for a given category, the latter relating
to its taxonomic function.
I am
planning to consult further the literature on archives so that I may
incorporate organizational and finding aids applicable to the DRA material. As
well, I would like to show this paper to various people in library science so
that I can consult with them about the DRA.
Organization
of the DRA. In the
following sections I will discuss issues which arise in the development of the
organization and implementation of the DRA archives. Chart 1 (p.l0) presents the
proposed organization and departmentation of the special collection DRA. Part A
is taken from a handout from Dr. Suzuki?s course LS 65OA, Administration of
Academic Libraries, (Spring, 1978), which shows the various departments of the
U.H. library and the hierarchical structure of their broad functions. I
based Part B for the DRA on this model, placing the DRA in the Special
Collections Department of the U.H. library. Part B follows the scalar
principle of hierarchy and illustrates a model of participatory management
(Massie, 1971) i.e. the division heads, the U.H. Librarian, the DRA Chief
Archivist, and the Director of the Undergraduate Applied Social Psychology
Program form the Administration Council. This body determines policy and
oversees all major operations of the DRA. Part C broadly defines the function
of each division. Part D represents a tentative attempt to specify particular
day?to?day operations in the DRA departments.
II.À PRINCIPLES AND THEORY:
The
Problem of Unit.
Archival collections unlike ordinary library holdings, do not have a standard
publication format. Because of this the special issue arises as to what is
here the unit that the librarian stores. In some circumstances there are
already provided pragmatic units defined by community transactions, such as
documents (which are self contained), photographs, letters, correspondence,
diaries, journals, tapes, etc. These can conveniently be marked individually
and referenced or catalogued by whatever identification markers are found suitable.
It is clear that these marking systems need be responsive to users, their
interests in particular sorts of information.
Since I am dealing with witnesses?
reports of their own daily lives, the issue of what?is-a?unit arises. One might
say that the person is the unit in the same sense that the author of a book is
a cataloguing unit; however, that may not be the interest of a user who is
interested in community life and therefore would wish to have units that
refer to places, activities, and events, or even tastes, feelings, and
attitudes. Other users might be interested in a particular person?s family
connections or patterns of relationships among a group of individuals.À Still other users might be
interested in the items of people?s belongings, or what category of
person one keeps in one?s wallet photographs.À These examples are sufficient to call attention to the key issue
in the feasibility of these DRA archives. This is what justifies the organizational
structure presented in section I. which can be seen to assign a key role to the
Education and Research Department.
The Cataloguing Issues Department is
in fact a continuous, ongoing research activity whose direct focus is the
identification of the? subject index for the DRA archives. This subject
index is called by James and Gordon (1975) an ethnosemantic glossary. Like the
Dewey Decimal and the LC systems, as well as Roget?s Thesaurus and the
Human Relations Area Files, an ethnosemantic glossary is a taxonomy that
represents community organized and maintained systems of knowledge. However,
while the Dewey and LC systems correspond to traditional academic curricula
subdivisions, the DRA Subject Index is to correspond to valid representations
of all or a significant number of the aspects of daily community life. The
Education and Research Department has to be responsive to the broad issues of accessibility
to units of information detailing the diversity and plurality of typical
communities in this country. This becomes essentially a cultural ethnography
expressed within units of identification familiar to users on their daily round
(known as ?Ethnomethodology?, as discussed by James & Gordon, 1978).
Therefore the cataloguing issue is intimately involved in such issues as
community demography, normative value, expressions, rules and regulations,
procedures and rituals, as well as perceptions, noticings, declarations,
imaginings. In short, the DRA Subject Index catalogues the sum total of a
community?s consciousness. As Shera (1961:169) noted
?A culture, almost by definition,
produces a œtranscript,? a record in more or less permanent form that can be
transmitted from generation to generation.?
The DRA
Subject Index reflects the portion of this ?cultural transcript? which
heretofore has remained undocumented.
The DRA Classification Scheme (Chart
2:À B, p. 16) is art ordered series of
six major classification levels. It represents an ethnosemantic glossary based
on the ?hexagrammatic coding system? and purports to be an exhaustive taxonomy
for the categories of personal experience reported spontaneously (James &
Gordon, 1975-78). The DRA system thus identifies the categories of the self on
the daily round (Chart 2: A, p. 15). The version presented in Chart 2: B
represents the current set of categories for which Daily Round Data now exist.
The classification will hierarchically extended as more categories are
stipulated (or found empirically) and defined through ethnosemantic research
on the spontaneous discourse segments of witnesses (called by James &
Gordon, 1975?78, ?Community Cataloguing Practices, CCP?s?). CCP?s are the
natural categories people use to describe experience on the daily round i.e.
?what units of description are being used in the community under investigation?
(James & Gordon, 1978: E8.1.5]). The DRA Subject Index will order the items
in the classification alphabetically and will contain SEE and SEE ALSO
networks of cross references, to be determined by research findings of the
Cataloguing Issues Department. It is not within the scope of this paper to
elaborate more fully on the items of the classification, but examples from
particular daily round categories appear in Chart 2: C, p. 24, which correspond
to categories marked by an asterisk in the Sample Classification Scheme for the
DRA.
The
Librarian as Social Psychologist. Still to be explored mere fully is the new position in the
community the librarian assumes as a result of these expanded functions.
Traditionally the librarian?s role in American society has been to provide leadership
and impetus for emergent social needs and services such as literacy, education,
assimilation of immigrants, adult education, art collections, multimedia use,
socialization. Lowell Martin states (Martin, 1937 in McCrimmon, 1975:95?6):
?On the one hand, it transmits the
social heritage and inculcates the values and experiences of the past into the
group, with a unifying effect; on the other, it enables the individual to
appraise present trends and future values, enhances the quality of his personal
life, and provides a means for climbing the social ladder. It is therefore an
integral factor in both the anabolic and katabolic processes which comprise the
metabolism of social life.?
The DRA
archives would continue this tradition by expanding the functions of the
librarian to the task of cataloguing the units of daily community life and
making it available to the literate layman. Awareness of such units constitutes
a crucial part of modern literacy skills. Perhaps because of my own training I
see the field of social psychology as the place in the social sciences where
librarians can make a significant contribution and from which they can draw
theory and method for classifying the field of ?social occasions.?
The
Problem of Accessibility. In the case of the Dewey and LC systems the issue of accessibility
translates into standard literacy skills which the community fosters and
maintains through education and training. This means that in order to be a
library consumer, the user must be socialized and assimilated before the
library process is available to him. The purpose of the DRA archives, however,
is to make accessible the details of community life on the very same terms that
the community life is being experienced by its members. Hence, one should not
set additional training conditions for accessibility beyond the ordinary terms
within which citizens transact their exchanges with each other and keep track
of the innumerable but actual details in the course of a day. In other words,
the information in the DRA archives is to be spontaneously available to the
user. Therefore, the cataloguing system is to be based on subject headings
which validly formulate the categories of one?s experience and presents them
in the terms and expressions that are recognizable to the ordinary literate
layman.
Further
to be investigated is the possibility that existing standardized record
keeping systems might be incorporated into the DRA Subject Index, for instance,
Roget?s Thesaurus, the Yellow Pages, the Almanac, etc.
III.À SPECIAL PROBLEMS:
The
Copyright Issue. To
investigate this issue I attended the Copyright Institute at the University of
Hawaii (1978) where I discovered that only a lawyer can provide specific
answers to particular issues. (Bloede, 1977) Apparently, legislation in this
area is untested, controversial, and it will undoubtedly be years before the
various aspects of the legislation are fully clarified and rendered usable. At
this time it would seem that contributors would retain copyright while granting
permission to add a copy to the circulating collection.
Further development is needed to investigate alternatives such as
allowing the contributor to withdraw his contribution at any time or not, or
what should be the minimal size of a contribution, or, for that matter, how
often a person is entitled to contribute.
The
Privacy Issue. This
issue is likely to be a delicate one given prevalent values which are complex
in an information society (P. P. s. c., 1977). On the one hand is American
culture?s doctrine of ?Man?s Home Is His Castle.? On the other hand is the
requirement of social security numbers and files in a technological society.
This ideological dialectic has an historical role to play out in our society
since it is at the very basis of Western society?s morality, aesthetics, and
metaphysics.
One might
argue that to avoid the political use of the DRA and to protect the validity
and objectivity of its contents, only signed contributions should be accepted.
In this way the library totally avoids the privacy issue and short circuits it
into an adult citizen?s personal, voluntary, and thoughtful contribution to the
community, a considered and mature one.
Whether or
not this requirement would constrict and limit the nature of the contributions
remains, in my opinion, to be determined. From previous work with DRA archives
I have noted that given art appropriate context for justifying contributions
the privacy act recedes. For instance, students of Psychology 222 report that
the presence of a tape recorder during a dinner conversation does not appear to
inhibit the natural course of events despite prior fears to that effect. Their
data bear this out. Similarly, within the context of learning to objectify
one?s experience through the writing of a daily round report of one?s
activities, one comes to realize a new perspective on one?s self as belonging
to a community schedule and therefore the circle of privacy diminishes in size;
what was formerly seen as personal turns out to be conventionalized. Our
imaginings no less than our gates are community property. In the work of ethno
semanticists James and Gordon (1975), the community forms the unit of
consciousness called ?sudden memory? and the unit of behavior which they call
?display repertoire?; in other words, sudden memory is the pool of
consciousness to which individual members have access through literacy and
Topic Domain Methodology (Nahl, 1976), and display repertoire is the pool of
available behaviors to which individuals have access through experience and
literacy (cf. their notion of ?orthograph?).
The
Problem of Organization and Funding. Course related contributions represent a cumulative and
research motivated data bank, in other words, students engaged in the study of Social
Psychology using the natural history approach prepare contributions within the
context of applying their learning. However, it is clear that the usefulness of
the DRA collection would be greatly enhanced if contributions were possible
from various sectors of the community. In that case policies need to be evolved
concerning the means of acquiring these contributions. One possibility is
through fieldwork by students, another is through creation of a general
community interest in the mapping of itself for its own reflection. Science and
entertainment thus coalesce into an educational experience.
The initial operation of the DRA process could be supported by funds for
course improvement, experimentation in large class teaching, training grants
for applied psychology, community support, and voluntary work. If these
activities result in a viable idea, one that is seen as a newly evolved value
in the community, then it would quite readily and naturally be absorbed, and
indeed claimed by the profession of librarianship.
IV.À SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION:
In presenting this preliminary proposal for establishing the DRA
archives as a special collection of the University of Hawaii library, I have
emphasized the role of scholarship and research which the DRA archives
promises. The information contained in and obtained by the DRA archives affords
art opportunity for expanding and elevating cultural literacy through the
development of a science of community. Social anthropologist Edward
Tyler (œPrimitive Culture?, 1871, in Benge, 1970:11) defined culture as ? . . .
that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and
arty other capabilities and habits acquired by men as a member of society.?
Daily round research demonstrates the empirical investigation of these aspects
of culture and succeeds in specifying them through the objective study of the
self on the daily round. The educational value of such knowledge cannot be
overemphasized, for is it not the goal of society to know itself, and is it not
the function of libraries to facilitate that endeavor?
|
CHART 1: PART C: DESCRIPTION OF DRA DEPARTMENTS |
2:
UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN: 3:
SPECIAL COLLECTION: DRA:
4:
ADMINISTRATION COUNCIL: 5: EDUCATION AND RESEARCH DEPT.: Cataloguing Issues:
Specialized
DRA Projects: 6.
ACQUISITIONS DEPT.: Community
Liaison Office: Data
Processing and Cataloguing
7:
USER SERVICES:
Circulation: |
Top Administrative officer responsible for all campus operations. Administrative
official responsible for all library operations. Proposed
educational and research special collection overseen by the DRA Chief
Archivist assisted by the Director of the Undergraduate Applied Social
Psychology Program, who is a regular faculty member of the Psychology Dept. Policy
making body comprised of the UH Librarian, the DRA Chief Archivist, and heads
of the three departments, oversees all major operations of the DRA i.e.
budgeting, personnel, supplies, maintenance, accounting, coordinating. Headed by
the Director of the Undergraduate Applied Social Psychology Program and
comprising three departments: Research
and development of special cataloguing system suitable for Daily Round Data. Cooperative
leadership function in helping establish DRA collections throughout the
country. Particular
applications in response to special community needs. Comprises
two departments: Public relations management overseeing contributions by individuals to
the collection. Computerized storage and accessibility as determined by the
Cataloguing Issues Dept. and fed to the Circulation Dept. Comprises
one department: Provides training
to student users and researchers in making use of special cataloguing system
and having it accessible through computer console recall. |
CHART 1:PART D:À ANNOTATED OUTLINE OF DRA DEPARTMENTATION
I.ÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀ ADMINISTRATION
COUNCIL
A.ÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀ Ex-officio
Members
I.ÀÀÀ UH Librarian
2.ÀÀ DRA Archivist
3.ÀÀ Director-Undergraduate Applied Social
Psychology Program
4.ÀÀ Others?
B.ÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀÀ Functions
1.ÀÀ Policy and Planning
2.ÀÀ Personnel and Staffing
3.ÀÀ Budget and Accounting
