Abstract
The study aims to determine how social networking tools can help to engage different actors in archive service systems in value co-creation. With this view, this research reviewed the literature on major issues of archive services and collected primary data from 68 local archive centers in Japan. In addition, Twitter data of the National Archives of Japan were collected and analyzed using SPSS 17.0 and SmartPLS. Results show that the archive service system requires three actors: stakeholders, archive staff, and users. These actors can be connected through social networking tools that enable the integration of knowledge and skills to improve the archive management quality and uplift the value of archival resources. The study proposed an integrated archive management framework incorporating the archive administrators, stakeholders, and users. Implementation of the proposed framework can ensure improved management for stakeholders, easily accessible content for users, and improved service and organizational trust for archive centers.
TopIntroduction
Archive management and services in the 21st century have been changed radically to keep pace with the changing users’ expectations and information-seeking behavior. Though archival resources bear its significance, it is valuable only when users can reach and use them. Accordingly, archivists have long sought to increase the visibility and accessibility of their collections to the users (Feeney, 1999). With this view, archive centers are forces to adopt the participatory and collaborative approach of using different web technologies. Lyons (2002) stated that the increased growth of digital technologies presents archivists with an opportunity to broaden and deepen their public service and community ties while reducing the wear and tear on the original documents. Over time, users’ expectations of archive services have also been changed in many folds. Now users expect digital content in virtual space to easily access and interact for their research and engagement (Daines & Nimer, 2009). Archivists are supposed to generate user-focused services to meet up the user demand. In this regard, user involvement in archiving service may uplift service quality. Therefore, archivists need to co-design archive services with the joint endeavor of users who seek to use them. However, the existing literature on archival studies emphasized different issues of archive preservation and management. As far the researcher aware, no study has been conducted on archive management to integrate users and other actors in the archive service system.
Service science describes different complex issues between people and technologies to optimize service values for service providers and consumers. Value co-creation also describes how service providers and service receivers actively involve and apply their skills and knowledge to benefit each other. Value co-creation requires the involvement of service providers and service receivers to interact and exchange knowledge through a common platform. Archival institutions throughout the world have been using social media tools for content delivery, promotion of their work, improving public relations, enriching social networking, etc. Archives centers consider social media as a ‘community hubs’ for strengthening relationships with the users’ community as well as other organizations for better access of content, increasing visibility of collection, promoting the reputation of the center, and advocating for the value of the archives resources and services (Terras, 2011). Social media tools can provide incredible opportunities for exposure and engagement by regularly updating content, active forum discussions, and interactions (Terras, 2011). Adopting social media in archives can promote the public image and the communication strategy of the archival services. Garaba (2012) stated that the use of social media among archival services and archivists is growing, and he believes that it is easy for these services and their staff to establish a social media presence. Accordingly, in this study, actor’s engagement in digital archives has been discussed from value co-creation and service science perspectives. The following sections of the paper demonstrate different archive management actors followed by social media roles in connecting various actors. Finally, the research further proposed a conceptual value co-creation model to deeply understand reciprocal value co-creation within and among the multiple entities archival across the value co-creation process.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Networking Tools: Social networking tools are computer aided web-based tools that support communication, collaboration and information sharing. Archive centers use different social networking tools like Facebook, twitter, YouTube, etc. to stay connected with users and deliver service information to community and receiving feedback on services.
Social media: Social media are interactive virtual communicative tool that connects individuals, groups or community people to interact with each other and enable to share information, ideas, thought, and other expression. Social media can serve archive centers as a ‘communication hubs’ for strengthening relationships with archive centers and users for better access of content, increasing visibility of collection, promoting the reputation of the center, and advocating for the value of the archives resources and service, etc.
Actors Engagement: Actors engagement is a reciprocal, social, and collective activities among the parties involved based on common institutional logic to meet the desired goal. In archive serves, actors engagement means the involvement of stakeholders, archive staffs, and users to share ideas, experiences, and directions with a view to enhancing archival values.
Archives 2.0: Archives 2.0 is a mechanism of using web 2.0 technologies along with different social media tools to digital contents of archives I. order to interact with users and improve archival communication among users and archivists, users and users, and users and archival resources.
Digital Archives: Archives are unpublished original documents relating to important historical, cultural, and administrative evidence of nations, regions, organizations, communities, as well as individuals. Archives bear functional, social, emotional and epistemic value of past important events evidence. When archival contents are transformed in digital form in order to ensure usability, durability and intellectual integrity of the information contained therein, then it is known as digital archives.
Value Co-Creations in Archives: Value co-creation in archives is a process of sharing service experience from the context of archive users, archive staffs, and stakeholders to identify the gap of existing service as well as determine future direction by meeting the expectation and efforts of all actors.