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?

 

LOOK AT CHART 1

LOOK AT CHART 1 part B

 

CHART 1: PART C: DESCRIPTION OF DRA DEPARTMENTS

 

1:

CHANCELLOR:

 

 

2: UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN:

 

3: SPECIAL COLLECTION: DRA:

(œTally Round Archives?)

 

 

 

 

4: ADMINISTRATION COUNCIL:

 

 

 

 

5: EDUCATION AND RESEARCH DEPT.:

 

 

Cataloguing Issues:

 

DRA Network:

 

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