Public programming in the archival literature: revelations from a content analysis of the subject matter

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify keywords that can be used to assist in the construction and development of public programming projects since public programming is not an indexing term in key bibliographic databases. The study was conducted using informetrics approaches and more specifically content analysis whereby the subject terms, words in abstracts, titles and full texts as well as author-supplied keywords were subjected to analysis to extract the most common words that can be used to inform public programming projects. The trend of publishing literature on public programming was also investigated. It was found that the literature on public programming has continued to grow, albeit slowly; the most common words in the abstracts formed eight clusters, while the words in full texts formed a total of seven clusters. The subject terms that yielded high frequency rates and which are relevant to public programming activities included the following: access to information, institutional repositories, marketing, access control to archives, digital preservation, open access publishing, training of archivists, outreach programmes, publicity, social media, and public relations. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) may play a greater role in public programming as reflected by a number of ICT-related terms that occurred frequently in the public programming literature.