Research Statement

At its core, my work is about power and empowerment. Knowledge, as the saying goes, is power; so too is information. Therefore, I situate this work within three primary power contexts: 

1. archives, human rights, and U.S. law; 

2. Western Art music, disability, and symbolic annihilation; and 

3. archival description practices, reparative description, and identity descriptions.

Information access (Dyson & Schellenberg, 2017; Mathiesen, 2014; Sturges & Gastinger, 2010; United Nations, 1948) and access to cultural heritage (Human Rights Council, 2022) are human rights. Mathiesen (2014) argues that a "person has access to information when [they have] the freedom or opportunity to obtain, make use of, and benefit from that information" (p. 607). 

But information access and access to cultural heritage are not practically attainable rights for all. While trained (academic) researchers might not notice such impediments, those without specific archival training might have difficulty navigating—either physically or digitally—archival offerings or understanding descriptive documents (Weiner et al., 2015). Many societies' collective knowledge and information is stored in archival records; if users cannot fully access archival information, they cannot fully exercise their rights to information access or cultural heritage.

My goal is to increase information access and access to cultural heritage for Disabled users (especially those whose disabilities are visual, cognitive, or audial), as well as music researchers and those who do not read academic English. By increasing the accessibility of archival materials for these populations, information access and access to cultural heritage will also increase for new and existing users, because those materials will be easier to find, to use, and to read.

To increase their accessibility, I have identified three metrics by which to evaluate online music archival records: discoverability, usability, and readability (DUR). Each of these metrics, in my thinking, falls under the broad umbrella of accessibility. Using the framing Mathiesen (2014) provides, the combination of discoverability and usability ensures that users can obtain and use it; readability partly ensures users can use it and partly ensures they can benefit from it.

As a result, my work combines discoverability, usability, and readability work and extends work around information access and archival usability (see especially: Dyson & Schellenberg, 2017; Mathiesen 2014; Southwell & Slater, 2013) to online music archives (Boyd, 2015; Puckett, 2009) in order to provide new insights into how best to provide access to users who do not read college-level English, music researchers, and especially to Disabled users. 

Specifically, I aim to answer the question "How can archivists increase the overall accessibility of online music archive materials?" To answer that question, I will use the DUR metrics to examine online music archive materials. Music archival materials are uniquely representative of other genres of archival materials because they encompass such a broad range of formats, which makes them a fruitful site for study. 

An area of particular interest for me is that of music scores themselves. At present, most archival music scores are made available as PDFs or other image-based files (JPEGs, PNGs, TIFFs, etc.), but those file types are not always compatible with the assistive technologies some Disabled users use (especially screen readers) (Pineo, 2025a, 2025b). Currently available tools can translate text- or even image-based PDFs to other formats, but these tools do not extend to music. Instead, PDF music scores need to be converted to other formats. Therefore, I have devised a workflow (Pineo, 2025d) and a set of guidelines (Pineo, 2025c) to help archivists make these conversions.

To carry out this work, I draw from the field of user studies (especially usability studies) to determine what works well and what could be improved on existing online music archive pages. In particular, I use usability tests to test the files resulting from the workflow and determine how best to improve both the individual files and the workflow as a whole. In the future, I aim to employ participatory design methods to center Disabled perspectives in all archival design processes, whether that be redesigning existing archival infrastructure or designing new infrastructure.

My findings translate from music archives to general ones, and some translate to in-person archives too. By gaining a deeper understanding of the needs and desires of the aforementioned user groups, archivists' knowledge of what constitutes a well-designed online record display page will be significantly improved. By improving that understanding, not only can archivists better facilitate the human right to information access and cultural heritage for all users, but they can also collect and construct more accurate, representative, and justice-filled archival records, collections, and descriptions.

For examples of work that has come out of this thinking, see the Publications page.