Abira Hussein  0:01  
Hello, I want to say thank you Anne for inviting me to talk and the presentation today, I just say that my one isn't necessarily going to be very technical one. And actually, Tom's talk beforehand was quite good. Because I think one of the end of your presentation made me think also, actually, the historical context of archives. And digitization also needs to be acknowledged, as these technologies develop around the presentation of archives. So this is just the website of our project that I'm going to share. But the presentation is really going to be speaking a lot about understanding what our archives are, and really thinking about how that's informed the project and the things I was thinking about when I was thinking about the presentation of archives. So I'll just say that I have to really begin with questioning what an archive is, who it's for, the power it wields, and how those of us on the margins can lay claim to it. The journey of understanding that, as in Debbie writes, is that archives are a result of judgement, not a piece of data, but status stitched together to reflect the desired past of institutions and states controlling how time and the past is consumed. And that digitization is a reflection of that material status. And I really want to speak about this as in the context of Towards a National Collection, the size of digitalization become a way of commemorating the past, a ritual of forgetting, and a way to bid farewell to their right to their violent history without acknowledging it at all to commodify and democratise the past to be consumed by the masses. The archive often fools us into believing that these disparate documents chosen and held together physically and tangentially online create a record of our time that it transformed from being single documents into a co-owned past. But I also believe that archives can be refigured as a space that it's not just about preservation, and limited access to the past, but plays a role in the present enabling healing and epistemic justice for marginalised groups. The project Kurdistan, by Susan resilence, which aim to create an archive of the Kurdish people's struggle for nationhood was documented in the 2015 book dissonant archives in that chapter are really a Azoulay chapter reflects through this project. That means I'll insist on restoring that which had been nearly displaced inside the Imperial Palace narrative, and later the national one, while turning the archive into a platform of rehabilitation for our community. You may be thinking, what the hell is this got to do with IIIF well? Well, I was looking for ways to represent archives that I held online. I was thinking a lot about my experiences as a diaspora, living away from the places that I learned myself untethered, and cultural institutions that are recognised as vestibules of history are all I'm told, I must anchor to, I often encountered were images of passive victims, depicted without agency, an object's devoid of context, and reflecting on the work of James Clifford, that said that encountering these often created radically asymmetrical relations of power, that are often seen in the ways these institutions engage with diasporic communities in their record, and how they're displayed physically, as well as online and through a European lens. And that records about the Somali British experience, controlled outside of mainstream structures are scarce. Jacques Derrida notes, the contingent nature of archives and anything that falls outside of these parameters often seen as not worthy to collect. All that describes archives as being anything that conveys information, a book, an object, a sound, and argues that digitization has further eroded those distinctions. I'd always felt that the distinction of objects, archives libraries, is quite fast, and actually thinking about how the Somali community reflects history being quite dynamic, that often there are sound, there's movement. There are objects there are there, there's place. And they have been separated by physically and digitally. And so I was interested in technology that can potentially combine the two. So discovering that IIIF was built by a community that was open and hackable and that the canvas potentially could be a space that could hold multiple forms of media excited me, and also that the monopoly of infrastructure was not just for those resources and departments. These technologies can answer some of the questions but not all. When collonialism continues to look in the digital infrastructure, then it causes tension for those recorded in it, and our memory is constructed outside of it. And that when we think about the presentation of archive that we also think about the layers behind it.

For community archives, the reality is that a lot of these archives that are developed outside of mainstream institutions are often fragile, often in a fragile state, and the digital preservation coalition has outlined those causes. Often it's the lack of funding and resources, which often lead to collections created with inadequate budgets to plan for aftercare. The lack of skills or training and being able to make the right technological choices to ensure that preservation of records exists. The challenge in maintaining technology and implementing systems what's often needed is funding, provide skills and training, to be able to maintain the digital assets online and offline and support to make the right technological choices to broker relationships with institutions to share their expertise. So this often leads to a double erasure, where archives of uncertain communities don't exist within mainstream archives. And this is further compounded by those that  disappear due to being unable to being unable to maintain their digital content. Once a project has ended. Michelle Caswell says if we want to build laboratory archives, laboratory for sustainability need to be baked into our organisational structure. So that was the landscape that I was working in thinking about how to represent and place these archives online. So how did I manage them with little technical expertise and resources to implement IIIF? Well, that began with a chance meeting with Ed and Sophie from never seen sitting in the audience listening to a presentation, we both sat there wondering how do SMEs, small medium enterprises and individuals participate in these vast swathes of funding calls, where the aim is to develop bold ideas, and innovate are often for those in spaces that are always there. What can you learn from enabling what's already occurred with just more money? So this conversation led to the Nomad project, which you can see in this website here, which was a collaboration between myself and Mnemoscene, I was interested in how digitization of archives and objects could create mobile digital assets that allow me to engage with them in ways a museum and an archive could not. If we place these in the games engine, could we create a world where I could be seen, the use of immersive technology could bring together my live knowledge and a disparate collection of smaller objects and archives that are scattered across institutions, I wanted to explore the affordances of this technology and IIIF, and if it could be a reparative space that acknowledges the objects past his dislocation from Somalia, its migration to the UK. And my encounters a Somali diaspora trying to understand what it means to have a living connection to these collections that technology has developed hasn't really developed as yet. But for my search for how to represent a code online. I believe that actually the Universal Viewer could be a platform that could do that. I could think about ways of showing the complexity that exists that could potentially reflect the tensions of community memories and institutional records. But the issue is whether that is recognised as these technologies are being built too this led to a mixed reality experience that was built using open source tools, and the archive, which you can see here. And so it was crowd sourced, we invited the community along to bring in objects and their stories, and we digitise them and place them in the archive. You can see here, so we use 3d, the universal use uses 3d is not necessarily recognised as IIIF at the moment. But we had sounds as well as photographs, that the hope was to be able to combine to actually be able to have an object with a sound. To have a piece of text with a sound, I recognise that that's happening right now with the Sve our Sounds project at the British Library. But this is a story isn't a reflection of what we would have liked to have happened. But hopefully, with more resources, that might be something that we could do in the future. So a strong focus of this project was not just to create something that looks nice online for a short duration, and then disappear years later when resources are limited. And we didn't really want to rely on complex and proprietary software. That's often a challenge. So this project uses static sites Jekyll, which enables then the website to be hosted on GitHub, and where most of the work is at the site or when the site is being generated. And so a static site could potentially save you time and money as it requires less maintenance and less server resources. It's reliable, scalable, and can handle high volumes of traffic quite well. So the Nomad project

was one of the first examples of using the UV for our community archive, and it demonstrates how free publishing tools and open documentation can enable small resource poor groups to host their own archival content. If you want to find out a bit more about how that was done, so Ed Silver's GitHub page is here and I'll share the link and it goes into a bit more detail about how it was developed. So the occasions to the archive or GitHub, as I mentioned, and this gives additional benefits of tracking changes through version histories. This provides free hosting up to one gigabyte per repository. Although the archive the can be split across multiple repositories if necessary to make backup copies in short, like longevity. The aim now is to continue to create publishing tools and support open documentation which allows archives such as these to be created by individual organisations hosting their archival content using low cost open source solutions like GitHub andGitLab. I think there are a vast Collections and Archives that exists outside of mainstream institutions that can bring innovation through their experiences and standpoints, and that they should be included as this technology is being developed, and questions around how and why this technology is being used, and that there should be rreciprocity between us and these institutions in terms of knowledge and expertise. And that national is not just a namesake, but a commitment to enable others to exist online, in their own terms, on their own terms, I should say. Thank you