Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage PICCH

The PICCH project was an international, interdisciplinary research project aimed at understanding audiovisual material of colonial origin in European archives. The project was funded by the national research councils of each of the participating research groups’ countries, i.e. Norway, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and Great Britain. The project had three archives as co-partners: the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the French Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), and the film and photo collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK.

The project’s point of departure was the history of the three European nations as colonial powers (the Netherlands, France and Great Britain). As a consequence, many audiovisual objects in these three countries’ archives contain visual and linguistic representations that perpetuate colonial ideologies, use outdated or offensive terms and perspectives, or are otherwise problematic when seen through modern critical frameworks. The research project's overall ambition was to open a dialogue between the archives and the users. The research group at OsloMet had the task of elucidating who the users are, what information needs they have, what search strategies they use, and the reasons for their success and failure.

Data was collected via questionnaires and interviews. Questionnaire data was collected to gain an understanding of who the users of the archives are, how familiar they are with the content, and what content they are looking for. The purpose of the interviews was to gain an understanding of how users search the archives and what challenges they experience. This included identifying what information needs and search strategies they have and what makes their information search successful or unsuccessful. The questionnaire results show that the archive users mainly have an academic background, for example as historians, archivists, university lecturers and students. Furthermore, the majority of respondents had some or a lot of knowledge of the archives. We interviewed academic archive users (researchers and archivists), who all showed high competence, in terms of domain knowledge as well as archival intelligence and artefactual competence.

The users' information needs are complex and are often characterized by consisting of several facets. From the questionnaire data, we identified four main facets: subject, place, time and media type. In addition, 'person' was used as a search facet. The findings were supported by the interviews, and we noticed the importance of personal names and geographical locations as search terms. Our results nuance the findings of how archives are searched, we give examples of many diverse information needs from the questionnaires and the interviews. The examples illustrate the need for more descriptive metadata at the unit level. The interview subjects' information needs correspond to Ingwersen's three types of information needs: verificative, conscious topical, and muddled topical information needs.