I hinted in the post below that there might be some changes coming up on this blog. This is because, as some of you will already know, I have moved on from West Yorkshire Archive Service, to start a PhD jointly supervised by UCL’s Department of Information Studies and The National Archives provisionally entitled ‘We Think, Not I think: Harnessing collaborative creativity to archival practice; implications of user participation for archival theory and practice‘.
This means that my interests are expanding beyond the original focus of Around the World in Eighty Gigabytes, which I originally set up to document my own voyages of discovery about digital preservation and how international initiatives in this field might be scaled down to apply within the small archives settings with which I was most familiar. I have umm-ed and ah-ed for a bit about what I should do now – start a new blog or morph this one to cover aspects of user participation? In the end, I have decided to continue with 80GB. There are various reasons for this:
- There are several common strands between digital preservation research and my current interests in user collaboration – they both relate to the impact of digital technologies on archival theory and practice, and many of the major issues (eg authority, context, trust, the cultural challenges of embedding technological change in operational settings) are debated in both areas of research. I had been thinking that these common themes would make for a good posting on Ada Lovelace day, but I didn’t, er, quite get round to it!
- I haven’t stopped being interested in digital preservation, or in the impact of digital technology on smaller archives, and I will continue to post on both themes when opportunities arise.
- I want a space to express my own personal opinions on things which interest me and to explore ideas. What I post here will not represent the views of The National Archives or UCL any more than my previous postings represented the official stance of West Yorkshire Archive Service.
- I flatter myself to think there are a few people who read my ramblings, and know me as 80GB. If they are interested in digital preservation and small archives, and are into following obscure blogs, I suspect they may be interested in reading about the implications of social media on archives too.
- Putting everything together should mean that I actually update the blog rather more regularly.
- To be blunt, there are a few events coming up that I think I will want to write about, and I can’t be bothered to set up a new blog…
However, if either of my current readers thinks that this is a really bad idea, they should please let me know in the comments…
Around the World in 80 Gigabytes 
As a regular reader I appreciate not having to find/set up another RSS feed to see your latest postings 🙂
To misquote Nestle at the start of their recent facebook publicity meltdown “your blog, you make the rules”
Hope the PhD going well; look forward to hearing/seeing updates.