Dec 08, 1999
Social application of digital archives for organizational memory: some implications through experimental projects in Japan
Koichi Hosoi, Ritsumeikan University

Abstract.

In Japan, recently, various digital archive has been made by public sector and business enterprises. In spite of the vast funds invested, most of these archives tend to be restricted to cultural and traditional assets and to be handled as a "picture postcard" rather than as a unity of tacit knowledge. I can point out three weak points. S1) Many digital archives are limited to cultural assets and tradition industrial arts. 2) Many archives are "ready-made" and therefore a ethos to "do it ourselves" is not brought up. 3) No device that utilizes a digital archive as a unity of knowledge exists. ty

I hypothetically determined three levels of organization / community. RI have categorized them as "organization", "community" and "city" for the present. I experimentally set fields of research for "community" and "city." I am creating two concrete digital archives and establishing experiment to utilize it. My research interest is how to revitalize organization / community by using devices to utilize a digital archive. I will introduce interesting research topics and our hypotheses based on the two field researches I conducted, "community of video game" and "Kyoto sightseeing".

The first field study is the Game Archive Project (GAP). Except for official user groups organized by the game maker, many video game user communities seem to be a narrow private group based on personal interpretation or liking. We considered how to connect these closed communities and how to promote knowledge circulation around them. We thought the key would be in peculiar style of knowledge interchange within the communities, and developed Unchiku (the spirit of hobby) system as its prototype. The second field study is the Kyoto Multimedia Sightseeing Project (KMSP). We developed the Kyoto Jintori Game as its prototype system, which was awarded the special prize of the Kyoto Edutainment Contest 1999. In this project, we regarded actions associated with sightseeing as a process of knowledge interchange between tourists and inhabitants. Then we paid attention to the style of sightseeing of tourists (especially the younger generation), and we developed a device to make a smooth knowledge interchange at the same time of pleasant sightseeing. From the results of the past three times experiment (1997-1998), I can conclude that this system will give remarkable influence to the actions associated with sightseeing of the younger generation.

I'm an associate professor of management theory at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. I'm also the director of the Game Archive Project and the coordinator of a collaborative project on digital archive which is propelled by the government and prefecture. I specialize in corporate behavior and human management, but my recent academic concern is in how to develop intelligence of organization / community with information technology.