Collaborations across borders between multiple positions within the university hierarchy is one of the most unique features of the construction of the FSU Card Archive. The implications of this unique collaboration for making meaning (taken from the archive by researchers) is traced across this webtext. It is of note that this collaboration bears particular importance in regard to the authorship of the archive. The nature of this collaboration has meant that no single part has sprung wholly from one individual (Fitzpatrick, 2009). Instead, the structure of the archive underscores its collaborative authorship through dialogues that have shaped and will continue to shape the emergence of the archive. By foregrounding these conversations that radiate from the original etchings on these cards, we have followed the advice of Kathleen Fitzpatrick who reminded us that we must "relinquish a certain degree of control" over the shaping of the archive in acknowledgement of "the ways that scholarship, even in fields in which sole authorship is the norm, has always been collaborative."
While you have read elsewhere in this webtext about the vested interests of senior faculty members Kathleen Yancey and Kristie Fleckenstein, these interests have been in collaboration with those of other, more junior faculty members, as well as graduate and undergraduate students. No one interest has wielded control over the archive's authorship. Rather, these interests have been negotiated throughout the archive's construction.
A location in the archive where we can trace one of the collaborations that has occurred along these borders of positionality within the university hierarchy is the subject heading category of the Dublin Core. We will break this collaboration down into a series of three, oversimplified dialogues in the next node.
