Volume 1, Issue 1 (2014) Proceedings from the 11th Annual Meeting of the Document Academy

Editorial Welcome to the Inaugural Volume

Kiersten F. Latham & Niels Windfeld Lund

We welcome you to the inaugural publication of The Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Document Academy (DOCAM). Started eleven years ago, the first annual meeting of DOCAM was held at UC Berkeley, organized by Michael Buckland and Niels Windfeld Lund. It was a convivial and comfortable convening, an open-ended discussion exploring the definitions and potentials of documents. The Academy was, from the start, meant to be a place where scholars, artists, practitioners, and students could share and explore with each other ideas that were raw, half-cooked, and nearly done. DOCAM was not limited to the field of library and information science, but invited the whole world to participate, with the intent to bring together those who may not normally get together, to discover, learn and grow together. This year, at the 11th annual meeting in Kent, Ohio for instance, attendees represented libraries, museums, archives, computer science, photography, filmmaking, art, architecture, and chemistry.

Since the original Berkeley meeting, every year there has been an annual meeting of DOCAM, held all over the world, from Norway to Texas, and from Canada to Australia (coming in 2015).

The Document Academy is not a formal organization with a board, a staff, or even bylaws. This is intentional and thought to be good for the openness of the community. Each year, 40-50 participants from around the world come together for this unique conference, always in one consecutive session, so that everyone participates together in the same experience.

Though informal, some "classical DOCAM themes" have emerged, like definitions of document, relevance of definitions, oral documents, analytical concepts, artistry, and new perspectives.

We hope to collect and archive as many of the first ten years’ programs as possible. For now, our first step into the DOCAM Proceedings is a very necessary step forward to enable and strengthen the documentation field as a community, embracing academics, scholarship, and exploration for any fields, professions, and cultures.

What started as a conversation in a Berkeley cafe has become a source of great friendship, emergent scholarship, and powerful networking, and remains just as comfortable as that first gathering in 2003. This first year’s sample of Proceedings papers helps tell the DOCAM story.