Some thoughts on this sunny Sunday morning:
-Reading this article (“Does Facebook Replace Face Time?”) and thinking about the changing nature of friendships and relationships with regard to digital interaction,I wanted to think a bit more about the impact that digital availability can have from the perspective of archives and users. Certainly in some ways it’s now more convenient for researchers to access some information than it ever was before–not just collections,but in some cases,contextual information about related collections and accession dates,digital surrogates of some materials,and community contributions around the documents (like the Polar Bear Expedition or the Library of Congress Flickr photostream).
How does this affect the relationship between the researcher and the archivist? What about the relationship between the researcher and the archives? Are they the same? From the user perspective,does all of the information gathered from various sources hold the same weight? How is the veracity of the information verified by the user,and should that matter to the archivist? Further,is all online exposure (web presence,blog,Tweets,newsletters,etc) good exposure?
-What is the impact of these new information streams from a records management view? For institutions out there with some of these types of exposure (website,blog,Twitter),what kind of yardstick are you using with regards to “enduring value”or retention time? Are you keeping digital copies of your website and blog posts in your institutional repository? What are you doing with these same digital materials from other departments of your company,university,agency,or other divisions within your purview? These are all questions that I’m struggling with as we work on updating not only our records retention plan,but also in the sense of disaster planning and determining records vital to operations.
-“Librarians want to dance. Archivists want to choose the music. Archivists don’t dance.”For some reason,this really cracked me up. Is this true,folks? Go over to Beaver Archivist’s blog and vote.
