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Through media practices, lesbian feminist activists take on a familiar killjoy role, supplanting fantasies of the digital with attention to everyday operations and uses that matter. In refusing to share the same orientation to “good” digital objects, they make room for other possible encounters with digital media.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

Choosing what to digitize and figuring out how to describe those objects in online databases is a significant responsibility because these decisions shape the ontology of the twenty-first-century archives as it becomes a space of primarily digital encounter.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

Descriptive practices can have significant effects on how users perceive and navigate materials when materials are encountered through a digital interface. Digital interfaces rely on metadata description to organize materials and provide access according to the logics behind these descriptions. They do so through set vocabularies that reflect how information workers who write metadata deploy their knowledge of the communities they work in and for. Descriptive practices can shape what an archive becomes in its digital form while potentially effacing the evidence of that shaping. “Good” digital interfaces resolve tensions by providing search retrieval and navigability that work so well the interface virtually disappears.

In contrast, lesbian-feminist history is complex, acrimonious, and multivalent, rooted in affective histories where sex, gender, race, class, and ability meet. The Lesbian Herstory Archives’ digital interface must struggle to find ways to represent the acrimony, ambivalence, and tension critical to lesbian-feminist histories.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

Because decisions about technology often feel mundane to the activists making them, it can be hard for historians to recover these histories—they are underdocumented or decades pass and people understandably forget details such as what machine they bought or what software they used.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

Decisions about new media matter, even when they are arbitrary. They are culturally and historical specific choices that have material effects at both technological and social levels. The choice of one database program over another is the beginning of a system that functions as a “protocol,” a set of techniques, routines, and control mechanisms that exert ongoing, operational pressure.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

When every tape gets tagged with the subject heading “lesbian,” the sorting and search functions mediated by an online database become inoperably general.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

As T. L. Cowan and Jas Rault argue, despite the momentum and excitement generated by digitizing rare queer and feminist materials, community-engaged archivists must consider how these materials might reflect “a set of experiences that the people involved had not agreed to share with a search-engine-enabled, entitled, and emboldened public beyond the initial, intended, integral audience.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

[... Digitization] never promises preservation. Archives do not just “digitize” a document one time; technological changes require ongoing format migration to avoid obsolescence, one of the reasons paper is actually one of the most stable formats for preservation. So while “digital networks have enabled the acceleration of access by reducing text to data,” as Hilderbrand notes, “digitization is not preservation”—or at least, not the kind of singular act of preservation we might hope for it to be.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

In community archives, digitation can be thought in a longer continuum of archival media practices that imagine opening up the field of who gets to participate in history making. Online access has the potential to shift who finds representation in history by making relevant primary sources available to marginalized researchers.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

The index reaches backward in time to establish a public retrospectively but does so to secure a public in the future—one that is unthreatening to the present because it is recognizable and anticipated.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney