Friday had a bit of a digital theme for me, beginning with a packed, standing-room-only session 302, Practical Approaches to Born-Digital Records: What Works Today. After a witty introduction by Chris Prom about his Fulbright research in Dundee, a series of speakers introduced their digital preservation work, with a real emphasis on ‘you too can do this’. I learnt about a few new tools: firefly, a tool which is used to scan for American social security numbers and other sensitive information – not much use in a British context, I imagine, but an interesting approach all the same; TreeSize Professional, a graphical hard disk analyser; and several projects were making use of the Duke Data Accessioner, a tool with which I was already familiar but have never used. During the morning session, I also popped in and out of ‘team-Brit’ session 304 Archives in the Web of Data which discussed developments in the UK and US in opening up and linking together archival descriptive data, and session 301 Archives on the Go: Using Mobile Technologies for Your Collections, where I caught a presentation on the use of FourSquare at Stanford University.
In the afternoon, I mostly concentrated on session 401, Re-arranging Arrangement and Description, with a brief foray into session 407, Faces of Diversity: Diasporic Archives and Archivists in the New Millennium. Unless I missed this whilst I was out at the other session, nobody in session 410 mentioned the series system as a possible alternative or resolution to some of the tensions identified in a strict application of hierarchically-interpreted original order, which surprised me. There were some hints towards a need for a more object-oriented view of description in a digital environment, and of methods of addressing the complexity of having multiple representations (physical, digital etc.), but I have been reading my UCL colleague Jenny Bunn’s recently completed PhD thesis, Multiple Narratives, Multiple Views: Observing Archival Description on flights for this trip, which would have added another layer to the discussion in this session.
And continuing the digital theme, I was handed a flyer for an event coming later this year (on 6th October): Day of Digital Archives which might interest some UK colleagues. This is
…an initiative to raise awareness of digital archives among both users and managers. On this day, archivists, digital humanists, programmers, or anyone else creating, using, or managing digital archives are asked to devote some of their social media output (i.e. tweets, blog posts, youtube videos etc.) to describing their work with digital archives. By collectively documenting what we do, we will be answering questions like: What are digital archives? Who uses them? How are they created and maanged? Why are they important?
Thanks for mentioning the Day of Digital Archives. I’d like to add that we are still happy to have participants join! if you work with, curate, create, or are just plain interested in digital archives please consider contributing. This can be as easy as tweeting something about what you are doing (related to digital archives) with the #digitalArchivesDay hash tag or you can contact me and be added to the blog. We’d love to get perspectives from all types of archives around the world. My email address can be found on the blog at: http://dayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com/p/about-project.html