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.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) grants individuals the freedom of opinion and expression (United Nations, 1948). This right is commonly interpreted to include the right to information access (Dyson & Schellenberg, 2017; Mathiesen, 2014; Sturges & Gastinger, 2010). Mathiesen (2014) argues that a "person has access to information when he/she has the freedom or opportunity to obtain, make use of, and benefit from that information" (p. 607).

But information access is not a practically accessible right for all. While trained (academic) researchers might not notice such an impediment, 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 right to information access.

My goal is to increase information access for Disabled users (especially those whose disabilities are visual, cognitive, or audial), those who do not read academic English, and music researchers. By increasing the accessibility of record pages for these populations, information access will also increase for new and existing users, because record pages 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.

Specifically, I aim to answer the question "How can archivists increase the discoverability, usability, and readability of online music archive materials?" To answer that question, I will use the DUR metrics to examine online music archive records pages. 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. 

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 information access to users who do not read college-level English, music researchers, and especially to Disabled users. 

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 archival record pages. I also draw from critical discourse analysis to deepen my understanding of how power dynamics—especially ableism—appear in music archives' descriptive language.

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 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.