From yvette.hackett at lac-bac.gc.ca Thu Nov 5 14:08:19 2009 From: yvette.hackett at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hackett, Yvette) Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 14:08:19 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond In-Reply-To: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF489@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF489@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Message-ID: The Paradigm Project posted a short video about the project to YouTube (1:15 min), "created for the Digital Preservation Award in the Conservation Awards, 2007". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew0wq0I4n90 Yvette Hackett Archiviste de projet/Project Archivist Direction des archives canadiennes et collections sp?ciales/Canadian Archives and Special Collections Branch Secteur de la collection du patrimoine/Documentary Heritage Collection Sector Biblioth?que et archives Canada/Library and Archives Canada 550, Place de la cit? Gatineau, Qu?bec K1A 0N4 yvette.hackett at lac-bac.gc.ca (819) 934-7383 Gouvernement du Canada/Government of Canada www.collectionscanada.gc.ca -----Original Message----- From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hobbs, Catherine Sent: October 26, 2009 10:16 AM To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: [Personal_archives] SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond Good morning, Please join us for a SISPA dialogue Nov. 16-20th on the topic of the Paradigm (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) project. Paradigm is a joint project between the Universities of Oxford and Manchester to "explore the issues involved in preserving digital private papers through gaining practical experience in accessioning and ingesting digital private papers into digital repositories, and processing these in line with archival and digital preservation requirements" (Paradigm website http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/). You are invited to review the contents of the paradigm.ac.uk in preparation for the dialogue and to consider questions or discussion topics which relate to personal archives creators and digital records. This dialogue stands to be a very interesting counterpart to our earlier dialogue with Cathy Marshall. How can we take the theoretical discussion we had about personal archives creators and their reactions to the world of the digital and work with them in a structured archival environment? Susan Thomas is a digital archivist at the Bodleian Library, where she is responsible for developing the Library's capacity to curate, preserve and provide access to born-digital archives. She currently leads the futureArch project, an Andrew W Mellon Foundation-sponsored initiative to develop and embed a sustainable approach to the curation of born-digital archives at the Library. Previous projects include PARADIGM (2005-7), which explored digital preservation issues relevant to manuscript collections and collecting using the papers of politicians as sample collections. Susan is also a member of the Data Standards Group Committee of the UK Society of Archivists, and an Honorary Lecturer at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, where she co-tutors a distance learning module in the management and preservation of digital records. Susan makes two additional suggestions for readings: With regard to reading, perhaps it may be worth taking a look at the futureArch project blog and some of the basic information the project at http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/beam/projects/futurearch If anyone wants to explore that further (beyond the website), they may like to read the article I wrote with Janette Martin back in 2005: Susan Thomas and Janette Martin, 'Using the papers of contemporary British politicians as a test bed for the preservation of digital personal archives,' Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol. 27 No. 1, April 2006, pp 29-56. Next SISPA dialogue: Our next SISPA dialogue in the Spring will draw upon an earlier suggestion: Personal Diaries. It would be interesting to invite Michael Piggott to chat with us during that week. Any other suggestions you have for a guest for this dialogue would be appreciated. Certainly, diaries are widely studied in the domains of archives, literary studies and biographical research, and the topic may lend itself to the two guests format. As always, I would be happy to hear any suggestions you have about the SISPA dialogues format and future dialogue topics. Looking forward to our discussion in a few weeks, Catherine Hobbs (SISPA Chair) Catherine Hobbs, Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language) / Archiviste, Archives litt?raires de langue anglaise Documentary Heritage Collection Sector / Secteur de la collection du patrimoine documentaire Library and Archives Canada / Biblioth?que et Archives Canada Place de la Cit?, Room / Piece 598, 550, boul. de la Cit?, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4 catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca T?l?phone /Telephone 819-934-8331 T?l?copieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333 Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada www.collectionscanada.gc.ca _______________________________________________ Personal_archives mailing list Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives From catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca Tue Nov 10 14:50:58 2009 From: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hobbs, Catherine) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:50:58 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond Message-ID: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4D2@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Good afternoon, A reminder that the dialogue with Susan Thomas on the Paradigm Project will begin on Monday morning. In preparation, you are invited to have a look at the Paradigm website http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/; the futureArch project http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/beam/projects/futurearc; and the Journal of the Society of Archivists article for those of you who have this available (Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol. 27 No. 1, April 2006, pp 29-56). This article is available as a paid download for non-members at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cjsa/2006/00000027/00000001. I am again reminded about how lucky we are that back issues of Archivaria are available free of charge through ACA but I am afraid that the JSA is a different scenario. Thank you too to Yvette for her suggestion of the Paradigm Project video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew0wq0I4n90. I, for one, look forward to hearing your interesting takes on the practical elements of dealing with personal digital archives and questions you might have for Susan. How do the problems and solutions presented by Paradigm relate to your own archival situations? ? bient?t, Catherine > ______________________________________________ > From: Hobbs, Catherine > Sent: October 26, 2009 10:16 AM > To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > Subject: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond > > Good morning, > > Please join us for a SISPA dialogue Nov. 16-20th on the topic of the Paradigm (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) project. Paradigm is a joint project between the Universities of Oxford and Manchester to "explore the issues involved in preserving digital private papers through gaining practical experience in accessioning and ingesting digital private papers into digital repositories, and processing these in line with archival and digital preservation requirements" (Paradigm website http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/). > You are invited to review the contents of the paradigm.ac.uk in preparation for the dialogue and to consider questions or discussion topics which relate to personal archives creators and digital records. This dialogue stands to be a very interesting counterpart to our earlier dialogue with Cathy Marshall. How can we take the theoretical discussion we had about personal archives creators and their reactions to the world of the digital and work with them in a structured archival environment? > > Susan Thomas is a digital archivist at the Bodleian Library, where she is responsible for developing the Library's capacity to curate, preserve and provide access to born-digital archives. She currently leads the futureArch project, an Andrew W Mellon Foundation-sponsored initiative to develop and embed a sustainable approach to the curation of born-digital archives at the Library. Previous projects include PARADIGM (2005-7), which explored digital preservation issues relevant to manuscript collections and collecting using the papers of politicians as sample collections. Susan is also a member of the Data Standards Group Committee of the UK Society of Archivists, and an Honorary Lecturer at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, where she co-tutors a distance learning module in the management and preservation of digital records. > > Susan makes two additional suggestions for readings: > With regard to reading, perhaps it may be worth taking a look at the futureArch project blog and some of the basic information the project at http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/beam/projects/futurearch > > If anyone wants to explore that further (beyond the website), they may like to read the article I wrote with Janette Martin back in 2005: Susan Thomas and Janette Martin, 'Using the papers of contemporary British politicians as a test bed for the preservation of digital personal archives,' Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol. 27 No. 1, April 2006, pp 29-56.> > > Next SISPA dialogue: > > Our next SISPA dialogue in the Spring will draw upon an earlier suggestion: Personal Diaries. It would be interesting to invite Michael Piggott to chat with us during that week. Any other suggestions you have for a guest for this dialogue would be appreciated. Certainly, diaries are widely studied in the domains of archives, literary studies and biographical research, and the topic may lend itself to the two guests format. > > As always, I would be happy to hear any suggestions you have about the SISPA dialogues format and future dialogue topics. > > Looking forward to our discussion in a few weeks, > Catherine Hobbs (SISPA Chair) > > Catherine Hobbs, > Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language) / Archiviste, Archives litt?raires de langue anglaise > Documentary Heritage Collection Sector / Secteur de la collection du patrimoine documentaire > Library and Archives Canada / Biblioth?que et Archives Canada > Place de la Cit?, Room / Piece 598, > 550, boul. de la Cit?, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4 > catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca > T?l?phone /Telephone 819-934-8331 > T?l?copieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333 > > Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada www.collectionscanada.gc.ca > > From catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca Tue Nov 10 16:38:34 2009 From: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hobbs, Catherine) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:38:34 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Bibliography on personal archives Message-ID: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4D9@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Good afternoon, I've added additional citations for Dever and Cox on the general page of the SISPA wiki. http://personalarchivesbibliography.pbworks.com/general Hoping that you keep the wiki in mind when you write or research topics on personal archives. Catherine From heilj at queensu.ca Thu Nov 12 15:37:32 2009 From: heilj at queensu.ca (heilj at queensu.ca) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:37:32 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond In-Reply-To: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4D2@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4D2@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Message-ID: Greetings all, For those of you interested in the Journal of the Society of Archivists article, but would rather hold on to your $38.34, a pre-print is available on the Paradigm website at http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/projectdocs/papers/paradigm-preprint.pdf. I look forward to next week's conversation! Jeremy ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hobbs, Catherine" Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 3:04 pm Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > Good afternoon, > > A reminder that the dialogue with Susan Thomas on the Paradigm > Project will begin on Monday morning.? > > In preparation, you are invited to have a look at the Paradigm > website http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/; > the futureArch project > http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/beam/projects/futurearc; and the > Journal of the Society of Archivists article for those of you > who have this available (Journal of the Society of Archivists, > Vol. 27 No. 1, April 2006, pp 29-56). > This article is available as a paid download for non-members at: > http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cjsa/2006/00000027/00000001.? I am again reminded about how lucky we are that back issues of Archivaria are available free of charge through ACA but I am afraid that the JSA is a different scenario.? Thank you too to Yvette for her suggestion of the Paradigm Project video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew0wq0I4n90. > > I, for one, look forward to hearing your interesting takes on > the practical elements of dealing with personal digital archives > and questions you might have for Susan. How do the problems and > solutions presented by Paradigm relate to your own archival > situations? > > ? bient?t, > Catherine > > > > ______________________________________________ > > From:? Hobbs, Catherine? > > Sent: October 26, 2009 10:16 AM > > To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > > Subject: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond > > > > Good morning, > > > > Please join us for a SISPA dialogue Nov. 16-20th on the topic > of the Paradigm (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) > project.? Paradigm is a joint project between the > Universities of Oxford and Manchester to "explore the issues > involved in preserving digital private papers through gaining > practical experience in accessioning and ingesting digital > private papers into digital repositories, and processing these > in line with archival and digital preservation requirements" > (Paradigm website http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/).? > > You are invited to review the contents of the paradigm.ac.uk > in preparation for the dialogue and to consider questions or > discussion topics which relate to personal archives creators and > digital records.? This dialogue stands to be a very > interesting counterpart to our earlier dialogue with Cathy > Marshall.? How can we take the theoretical discussion we > had about personal archives creators and their reactions to the > world of the digital and work with them in a structured archival > environment?> > > Susan Thomas is a digital archivist at the Bodleian Library, > where she is responsible for developing the Library's capacity > to curate, preserve and provide access to born-digital archives. > She currently leads the futureArch project, an Andrew W Mellon > Foundation-sponsored initiative to develop and embed a > sustainable approach to the curation of born-digital archives at > the Library. Previous projects include PARADIGM (2005-7), which > explored digital preservation issues relevant to manuscript > collections and collecting using the papers of politicians as > sample collections. Susan is also a member of the Data Standards > Group Committee of the UK Society of Archivists, and an Honorary > Lecturer at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies at > the University of Dundee, where she co-tutors a distance > learning module in the management and preservation of digital records. > > > > Susan makes two additional suggestions for readings: > > With regard to reading, perhaps it may be worth taking a look > at the futureArch project blog and some of the basic information > the project at http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/beam/projects/futurearch > > > > If anyone wants to explore that further (beyond the website), > they may like to read the article I wrote with Janette Martin > back in 2005: Susan Thomas and Janette Martin, 'Using the papers > of contemporary British politicians as a test bed for the > preservation of digital personal archives,' Journal of the > Society of Archivists, Vol. 27 No. 1, April 2006, pp 29-56.> > > > > Next SISPA dialogue: > > > > Our next SISPA dialogue in the Spring will draw upon an > earlier suggestion: Personal Diaries. It would be interesting to > invite Michael Piggott to chat with us during that week.? > Any other suggestions you have for a guest for this dialogue > would be appreciated.? Certainly, diaries are widely > studied in the domains of archives, literary studies and > biographical research, and the topic may lend itself to the two > guests format.? > > > > As always, I would be happy to hear any suggestions you have > about the SISPA dialogues format and future dialogue > topics.? > > > > Looking forward to our discussion in a few weeks, > > Catherine Hobbs (SISPA Chair) > > > > Catherine Hobbs, > > Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language) / Archiviste, > Archives litt?raires de langue anglaise > > Documentary Heritage Collection Sector / Secteur de la > collection du patrimoine documentaire > > Library and Archives Canada / Biblioth?que et Archives Canada > > Place de la Cit?, Room / Piece 598, > > 550, boul. de la Cit?, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4 > > catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca > > T?l?phone /Telephone 819-934-8331 > > T?l?copieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333 > > > > Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada? > www.collectionscanada.gc.ca> > > > _______________________________________________ > Personal_archives mailing list > Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives > Jeremy Heil Technical Services Archivist Queen's University Archives Kathleen Ryan Hall, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Tel: 613-533-6000 ext. 74462? Web: http://archives.queensu.ca -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091112/26cc785b/attachment.html From catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca Thu Nov 12 16:35:35 2009 From: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hobbs, Catherine) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:35:35 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas andbeyond In-Reply-To: References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4D2@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Message-ID: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4E4@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Thanks Jeremy. Quite right. ________________________________ From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of heilj at queensu.ca Sent: November 12, 2009 3:38 PM To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] FW: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas andbeyond Greetings all, For those of you interested in the Journal of the Society of Archivists article, but would rather hold on to your $38.34, a pre-print is available on the Paradigm website at http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/projectdocs/papers/paradigm-preprint.pdf. I look forward to next week's conversation! Jeremy ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hobbs, Catherine" Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 3:04 pm Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > Good afternoon, > > A reminder that the dialogue with Susan Thomas on the Paradigm > Project will begin on Monday morning. > > In preparation, you are invited to have a look at the Paradigm > website http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/; > the futureArch project > http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/beam/projects/futurearc; and the > Journal of the Society of Archivists article for those of you > who have this available (Journal of the Society of Archivists, > Vol. 27 No. 1, April 2006, pp 29-56). > This article is available as a paid download for non-members at: > http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cjsa/2006/00000027/00000001. I am again reminded about how lucky we are that back issues of Archivaria are available free of charge through ACA but I am afraid that the JSA is a different scenario. Thank you too to Yvette for her suggestion of the Paradigm Project video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew0wq0I4n90. > > I, for one, look forward to hearing your interesting takes on > the practical elements of dealing with personal digital archives > and questions you might have for Susan. How do the problems and > solutions presented by Paradigm relate to your own archival > situations? > > ? bient?t, > Catherine > > > > ______________________________________________ > > From: Hobbs, Catherine > > Sent: October 26, 2009 10:16 AM > > To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > > Subject: SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond > > > > Good morning, > > > > Please join us for a SISPA dialogue Nov. 16-20th on the topic > of the Paradigm (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) > project. Paradigm is a joint project between the > Universities of Oxford and Manchester to "explore the issues > involved in preserving digital private papers through gaining > practical experience in accessioning and ingesting digital > private papers into digital repositories, and processing these > in line with archival and digital preservation requirements" > (Paradigm website http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/). > > You are invited to review the contents of the paradigm.ac.uk > in preparation for the dialogue and to consider questions or > discussion topics which relate to personal archives creators and > digital records. This dialogue stands to be a very > interesting counterpart to our earlier dialogue with Cathy > Marshall. How can we take the theoretical discussion we > had about personal archives creators and their reactions to the > world of the digital and work with them in a structured archival > environment?> > > Susan Thomas is a digital archivist at the Bodleian Library, > where she is responsible for developing the Library's capacity > to curate, preserve and provide access to born-digital archives. > She currently leads the futureArch project, an Andrew W Mellon > Foundation-sponsored initiative to develop and embed a > sustainable approach to the curation of born-digital archives at > the Library. Previous projects include PARADIGM (2005-7), which > explored digital preservation issues relevant to manuscript > collections and collecting using the papers of politicians as > sample collections. Susan is also a member of the Data Standards > Group Committee of the UK Society of Archivists, and an Honorary > Lecturer at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies at > the University of Dundee, where she co-tutors a distance > learning module in the management and preservation of digital records. > > > > Susan makes two additional suggestions for readings: > > With regard to reading, perhaps it may be worth taking a look > at the futureArch project blog and some of the basic information > the project at http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/beam/projects/futurearch > > > > If anyone wants to explore that further (beyond the website), > they may like to read the article I wrote with Janette Martin > back in 2005: Susan Thomas and Janette Martin, 'Using the papers > of contemporary British politicians as a test bed for the > preservation of digital personal archives,' Journal of the > Society of Archivists, Vol. 27 No. 1, April 2006, pp 29-56.> > > > > Next SISPA dialogue: > > > > Our next SISPA dialogue in the Spring will draw upon an > earlier suggestion: Personal Diaries. It would be interesting to > invite Michael Piggott to chat with us during that week. > Any other suggestions you have for a guest for this dialogue > would be appreciated. Certainly, diaries are widely > studied in the domains of archives, literary studies and > biographical research, and the topic may lend itself to the two > guests format. > > > > As always, I would be happy to hear any suggestions you have > about the SISPA dialogues format and future dialogue > topics. > > > > Looking forward to our discussion in a few weeks, > > Catherine Hobbs (SISPA Chair) > > > > Catherine Hobbs, > > Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language) / Archiviste, > Archives litt?raires de langue anglaise > > Documentary Heritage Collection Sector / Secteur de la > collection du patrimoine documentaire > > Library and Archives Canada / Biblioth?que et Archives Canada > > Place de la Cit?, Room / Piece 598, > > 550, boul. de la Cit?, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4 > > catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca > > T?l?phone /Telephone 819-934-8331 > > T?l?copieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333 > > > > Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada > www.collectionscanada.gc.ca> > > > _______________________________________________ > Personal_archives mailing list > Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives > Jeremy Heil Technical Services Archivist Queen's University Archives Kathleen Ryan Hall, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Tel: 613-533-6000 ext. 74462 Web: http://archives.queensu.ca -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091112/cb92860c/attachment-0001.html From catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca Mon Nov 16 08:56:19 2009 From: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hobbs, Catherine) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:56:19 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan Message-ID: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4ED@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Good morning (Well, of course it's "good afternoon" to Susan), A warm welcome to Susan Thomas, digital archivist at the Bodleian Library at Oxford who is here to discuss the PARADIGM project and digital personal archives issues with us this week. >From my reading about the PARADIGM project, I have to say that I am greatly impressed with the resulting workbook: its clarity, its structure and its continual emphasis on alternate approaches and the pros and cons of different considered solutions. However, before things get too technical, I would like to ask two questions of Susan which relate to the emphasis of the project on personal archives: 1) In discussing the choice to study politicians personal archives, there is some consideration of how politicians archives are perhaps a-typical of personal archives in general (i.e. there are created by politicians offices and are comprised of professional documentation) and how much of what we might consider to be personal documentation was missing from the study. Can you elaborate a bit on the early discussions you and your colleagues at Manchester had about these issues of what constitutes a personal archive and how the case study may or may not be transferable to other types of personal archives? In the very first year of the SISPA group (2001-2002), we had a rather interesting discussion along the lines of how politicians archives seem to exist at a certain margin between personal fonds and the public record. Has there been any attempt to model this approach to other types of personal archives (writers fonds or family archives, for example)? 2) The workbook discusses post-custodial strategies with regard to saving personal digital archives from their fates. Could you elaborate on the reactions of the creators of these archives in terms of the site visit and on-site appraisal interventions as well as to the suggestions that they manage their own archives in particular ways? The workbook takes the approach that post-custodial intervention done carefully and respecting the creator's freedoms is key to the process and would achieve an optimal result. My own experiences acquiring digital archives have shown a range of openness to intervention, and perhaps greater hesitation about allowing access to digital documents than paper ones. Can you elaborate on the experiences of the project archivists in terms of intervention? Looking forward to hearing more, Catherine (SISPA Chair) Catherine Hobbs, Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language) / Archiviste, Archives litt?raires de langue anglaise Documentary Heritage Collection Sector / Secteur de la collection du patrimoine documentaire Library and Archives Canada / Biblioth?que et Archives Canada Place de la Cit?, Room / Piece 598, 550, boul. de la Cit?, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4 catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca T?l?phone /Telephone 819-934-8331 T?l?copieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333 Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada www.collectionscanada.gc.ca From catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca Mon Nov 16 10:58:28 2009 From: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hobbs, Catherine) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:58:28 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan In-Reply-To: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646636CC3A8@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4ED@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646636CC3A8@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Message-ID: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4F1@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Thanks Sue, Two quick comments: "In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are not entirely atypical in this intermingling of personal and employer materials. You can see similar issues in anyone's personal archive, where organisational and personal professional records start to get intertwined." True. Indeed, during the discussion had by SISPA on that topic this was also felt to be the case. The whole concept of hybrid archives also caught my interest and led me to wonder whether or not the arrangement of a personal fonds might be affected by the type of hybrid lifestyle of the creator. Example: if the fonds predominantly contained textual paper records but email was rarely used or the computer was used to create only drafts after annotating paper copies, this would affect the arrangement of the hybrid archive (i.e. the computer records might form specific series or subseries) rather than if the creator led a fully integrated lifestyle in which case series might be integrated across hard copy and paper. I wondered a lot about the arrangement decisions made in that chapter and would love some elaboration on those types of decisions as demonstrated by those examples. Catherine -----Original Message----- From: Susan E Thomas [mailto:susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk] Sent: November 16, 2009 10:35 AM To: Hobbs, Catherine Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan Hello Catherine, Thanks for the welcome and your kind words about the Paradigm workbook. I think this discussion series is a great idea, and I look forward to our conversation over the coming week. Two interesting questions to get us started! I'll take the first question in this email and explore the nature of the personal archives of politicians. We did discuss this often as the project unfolded and we were able to reflect on the test bed materials coming into the project. Our feeling was that a personal archive could, potentially, contain a wide range of materials documenting an individuals' various roles but that it need not contain the full range. When we looked back at our existing holdings, this variation in the richness of personal archives was evident. Interestingly, hybrid (meaning analogue + digital) archives acquired by the Bodleian during the Paradigm project, rather than through it, are much more rounded. In part, perhaps, because they cover an individual's lifespan, and include more 'personal' materials. Paradigm's testbed was hampered, I think, because the idea of giving your archive to a short-term experimental project is rather different to the idea of entrusting it to the Bodleian Library. The issue of personal fonds v public record is one we faced too. We also found some overlap with content held in the archives of the political parties. In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are not entirely atypical in this intermingling of personal and employer materials. You can see similar issues in anyone's personal archive, where organisational and personal professional records start to get intertwined. How transferable is the case study to different contexts? As both the Bodleian and the Rylands collect widely, this is a question that cropped up during the project. How did we think the archives of writers or scientists might be different, and what might we need to change as a result? This was not an area we could explore in the context of the project, but the Bodleian is developing hybrid (traditional + digital) archives in other areas and our experiences are growing through this process. The questions we tend to ask an individual don't change too much according to their profession, but some of the answers they give do. The commercial considerations around literary archives have the potential to frame the discussion rather differently, as do the credit and IPR issues in science and technology. I think we need more experience to draw out useful patterns, but we can point to areas that would benefit from a bit more exploration. Some of these areas touch on the records as much as the people; for instance, I'm working with a literary hybrid archive at the moment and I'd really like to see a tool that identifies whether a word processed document contains comments or track changes! I'd love to hear about others' experiences with the personal archives that contain digital materials, whether they are those of writers, scientists, or anyone else! I'm familiar with a few case studies, including the work done on the NEH grant 'Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials', and work done on scientist's archives at the British Library. Have others been working actively with born-digital personal archives? What interesting things have you discovered? Susan -----Original Message----- From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu on behalf of Hobbs, Catherine Sent: Mon 16/11/2009 1:56 PM To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan Good morning (Well, of course it's "good afternoon" to Susan), A warm welcome to Susan Thomas, digital archivist at the Bodleian Library at Oxford who is here to discuss the PARADIGM project and digital personal archives issues with us this week. >From my reading about the PARADIGM project, I have to say that I am greatly impressed with the resulting workbook: its clarity, its structure and its continual emphasis on alternate approaches and the pros and cons of different considered solutions. However, before things get too technical, I would like to ask two questions of Susan which relate to the emphasis of the project on personal archives: 1) In discussing the choice to study politicians personal archives, there is some consideration of how politicians archives are perhaps a-typical of personal archives in general (i.e. there are created by politicians offices and are comprised of professional documentation) and how much of what we might consider to be personal documentation was missing from the study. Can you elaborate a bit on the early discussions you and your colleagues at Manchester had about these issues of what constitutes a personal archive and how the case study may or may not be transferable to other types of personal archives? In the very first year of the SISPA group (2001-2002), we had a rather interesting discussion along the lines of how politicians archives seem to exist at a certain margin between personal fonds and the public record. Has there been any attempt to model this approach to other types of personal archives (writers fonds or family archives, for example)? 2) The workbook discusses post-custodial strategies with regard to saving personal digital archives from their fates. Could you elaborate on the reactions of the creators of these archives in terms of the site visit and on-site appraisal interventions as well as to the suggestions that they manage their own archives in particular ways? The workbook takes the approach that post-custodial intervention done carefully and respecting the creator's freedoms is key to the process and would achieve an optimal result. My own experiences acquiring digital archives have shown a range of openness to intervention, and perhaps greater hesitation about allowing access to digital documents than paper ones. Can you elaborate on the experiences of the project archivists in terms of intervention? Looking forward to hearing more, Catherine (SISPA Chair) Catherine Hobbs, Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language) / Archiviste, Archives litt?raires de langue anglaise Documentary Heritage Collection Sector / Secteur de la collection du patrimoine documentaire Library and Archives Canada / Biblioth?que et Archives Canada Place de la Cit?, Room / Piece 598, 550, boul. de la Cit?, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4 catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca T?l?phone /Telephone 819-934-8331 T?l?copieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333 Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada www.collectionscanada.gc.ca _______________________________________________ Personal_archives mailing list Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives From RICKBARRY at aol.com Mon Nov 16 17:39:55 2009 From: RICKBARRY at aol.com (RICKBARRY at aol.com) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:39:55 EST Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts, and hybrid personal vs. work archives Message-ID: Thanks, Susan for your response to Catherine's insightful openers, which had also come to my mind. I have a related issue I'd like to put to you, but I'll submit that separately when the current issues have had a chance to be vetted. I agree with your observation that individuals will often have a mix of personal and work records in their possession, especially where they have played a personal part in the business transactions relating to work records. However, I would caution the co-joining of such records in institutional archives. Firstly, in many cases work records may have been internally designated by the organization as confidential. I'm not talking about the obvious cases of national security agencies where sensitive records should be page marked and unauthorized dissemination could be a criminal offense (in the US, NARA requires that copies of formerly security classified records in their possession be specifically page marked at time of copying to note the NARA authority declassifying them). Rather, I'm referring to so-called "Company-Confidential" or other organizations' similarly classified records that are not governed by national/local laws but rather by internal policy. Even these may be easy for the collecting institution to spot and question if the records are actually marked on each page to signify such a status. However, organizations may designate whole groups of, or all, internal communications as confidential and strictly for internal dissemination only and in some cases even restricted internal recipients without the records being individually marked. This gives rise to potential liability of the individual donor (possibly unknowingly or unthinkingly), and potentially of the collecting institution based on IPR considerations. (We have all observed emails from individuals that even with lunch dates or other ethereal emails, have a routine signature line that states that this communication is confidential and should be returned or destroyed if misdirected -- a practice that some legal experts claim would never be acceptable in a courtroom in defense of an individual if it can be demonstrated that the sender used this signature line indiscriminately instead of only for communications that clearly met the organization's security policies.) Moreover, it is highly likely that many employer records maintained by the individual were kept in violation of organizational recordkeeping policies and schedules, as most would likely have been designated for destruction after a certain period or for transfer as part of the individual's parent unit to the organization's archives. Thus, the individual might be, even unknowingly, opening him/herself to trouble sometime down the road, as might the institution receiving such records. At the least, the collecting organization could be faced with a hornet's nest as to what disposition to make upon the death of the donor, even with a carefully written donor agreement, because the donor didn't have the right to donate employer records in the first place. You asked us to share related personal experiences: When I retired from the World Bank in 1992, I donated a few thousand records covering the period 1972-1989 to the Bank Archives (which, as chief of information services, I had earlier managed). Most of them might be described as personal-Bank records in the sense that they were records of Bank processes/transactions in which I was a party, but not in the sense that I "owned" them, which I clearly did not according to well defined policy. To illustrate, some of them were 'informal' email exchanges (aka 'records') reacting to a draft policy I had written on public disclosure of information. That was a highly controversial topic in the Bank's boardroom, especially between directors from developing countries and those from industrialized countries. It was a media-hybrid set, many of which were in the form email including the first email I had ever sent using the Bank's original email system, which I had managed earlier as chief of office systems. I thought that those records would be of interest not only for content purposes, but because I knew that at that time the Archives didn't have a significant corpus of the new email record type (as distinct from a fake test set) that could be useful for my succeeding colleagues to have to "play with" in the context of developing an electronic records program, and the Archivist agreed. Ironically, those born digital emails, which were of course created in a proprietary standard email system that subsequently had to be all printed out to paper when a different vendor was selected for the replacement email system, which was in a different proprietary standard, and the two didn't talk to each other. Some time thereafter as I understand it -- you guessed it -- they were scanned back into digital form for easier access. This is an example of how organizations do sometimes have to "pay twice" to get records into digital form. I have recently thought about putting a brief description of this experience up in the Personal E-Recs section of my Website. I wouldn't ask to put up the records themselves, but rather just the description _http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentM DK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlets~theSi tePK:29506,00.html_ (http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:4373 78~sp:servlets~theSitePK:29506,00.html) which I hope would be authorized. My point here is that this approach to combined personal/business records dilemma might be a reasonable solution, i.e., to accept from the donor the strictly personal individual records but only the description of the 'personal/agency/company/institution' files. This would probably involve the receiving archivist/curator gently moving the donor in the direction of first donating such records to his/her organization for description. Or to accept the records initially but then return the employer records after accessioning on the grounds that they would not meet your collection policy. However this matter is handled, the collecting institution will have to treat the subject with care and sensitivity when engaging the potential donor in such a manner as not to lose his/her interest in gifting. This might possibly be presented as an ethical/legal matter and one that the donor would likely face with any recipient. Better to lose the donation than to take it with issues that may come back to bite you or your successors sometime later down the road. Regards, Rick -----Original Message----- From: Susan E Thomas [mailto:susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk] Sent: November 16, 2009 10:35 AM To: Hobbs, Catherine Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan Hello Catherine, ....The issue of personal fonds v public record is one we faced too. We also found some overlap with content held in the archives of the political parties. In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are not entirely atypical in this intermingling of personal and employer materials. You can see similar issues in anyone's personal archive, where organisational and personal professional records start to get intertwined. How transferable is the case study to different contexts? As both the Bodleian and the Rylands collect widely, this is a question that cropped up during the project. How did we think the archives of writers or scientists might be different, and what might we need to change as a result? This was not an area we could explore in the context of the project, but the Bodleian is developing hybrid (traditional + digital) archives in other areas and our experiences are growing through this process. The questions we tend to ask an individual don't change too much according to their profession, but some of the answers they give do. The commercial considerations around literary archives have the potential to frame the discussion rather differently, as do the credit and IPR issues in science and technology. I think we need more experience to draw out useful patterns, but we can point to areas that would benefit from a bit more exploration. Some of these areas touch on the records as much as the people; for instance, I'm working with a literary hybrid archive at the moment and I'd really like to see a tool that identifies whether a word processed document contains comments or track changes! I'd love to hear about others' experiences with the personal archives that contain digital materials, whether they are those of writers, scientists, or anyone else! I'm familiar with a few case studies, including the work done on the NEH grant 'Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials', and work done on scientist's archives at the British Library. Have others been working actively with born-digital personal archives? What interesting things have you discovered? Susan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091116/5956c764/attachment.html From susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk Tue Nov 17 05:19:47 2009 From: susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk (Susan E Thomas) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:19:47 -0000 Subject: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan In-Reply-To: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4ED@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4ED@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Message-ID: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB6466397205E@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> On to the second question... My experience to-date suggests that reactions to post-custodial strategies vary. In Paradigm, we were dealing largely with assistants who had different attitudes to the project's objectives, and sometimes concerns about what it could mean for them (they would likely feature in the archive after all). Some assistants were enormously helpful and engaged, but this was more typical for those cases where the politician's engagement with the project was secondary to their engagement with the Library. In short, the post-custodial approach appears to work best when the creator is ready (is organised enough and understands what they're getting into), willing (has time) and keen (is motivated) to be archived. In the Bodleian's regular collection development, it is becoming more common for us to offer an opportunity to discuss the digital element of an archive. Some creators genuinely want some help, and they at least want to know how to get the material to the Library. The objective of a site visit isn't necessarily to alter a creator's practices (unless something really worrying is apparent!), so much as to talk about risks that can be mitigated and to learn about the creator's operating context. Sometimes it's not within the power of the individual to change how they operate with technology in any major way: they could be dependent on a particular person or group for the services they use, and they have limited power (or confidence) to tweak things. Even if the visit doesn't alter an individual's practices one iota, it informs the Library of what's coming next, and that in itself is very helpful. It also gives the creator and the Library a chance to start exploring the boundaries of the archive - this will become more and more important as archivists use digital forensic technologies, which are capable of revealing much more from a person's hard disk than is available through the creator's regular interaction with their machine. Talking to creators is also going to be necessary if we're to stand any chance of capturing the material that they've stowed in online services. I think it's true to say that creators are often willing to show/give papers more readily than digital archives. Why is that? Well, most digital materials aren't very old yet. In my experience this means that creators don't see them as archives, and, even if they do, not enough time has passed to make them feel comfortable about transferring the material. Papers are often older and bulkier, and sometimes giving them to an archivist is a relief. At the project outset I had thought that individuals would be more willing to give digital materials, as they could more easily give copies while maintaining copies themselves; sometimes this is a helpful factor, bit it's not always enough. I also found that some were nervous about the security of digital materials, as stories of paper dossiers left on trains seemed to be overtaken by stories of laptops and flash drives being mislaid, or emails leaked to newspapers. Susan Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES > -----Original Message----- > From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu > [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf > Of Hobbs, Catherine > Sent: 16 November 2009 13:56 > To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > Subject: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions > for Susan > > Good morning (Well, of course it's "good afternoon" to Susan), > > A warm welcome to Susan Thomas, digital archivist at the > Bodleian Library at Oxford who is here to discuss the > PARADIGM project and digital personal archives issues with us > this week. > > >From my reading about the PARADIGM project, I have to say > that I am greatly impressed with the resulting workbook: its > clarity, its structure and its continual emphasis on > alternate approaches and the pros and cons of different > considered solutions. > > However, before things get too technical, I would like to ask > two questions of Susan which relate to the emphasis of the > project on personal archives: > > 1) In discussing the choice to study politicians personal > archives, there is some consideration of how politicians > archives are perhaps a-typical of personal archives in > general (i.e. there are created by politicians offices and > are comprised of professional documentation) and how much of > what we might consider to be personal documentation was > missing from the study. Can you elaborate a bit on the early > discussions you and your colleagues at Manchester had about > these issues of what constitutes a personal archive and how > the case study may or may not be transferable to other types > of personal archives? In the very first year of the SISPA > group (2001-2002), we had a rather interesting discussion > along the lines of how politicians archives seem to exist at > a certain margin between personal fonds and the public > record. Has there been any attempt to model this approach to > other types of personal archives (writers fonds or family > archives, for example)? > > 2) The workbook discusses post-custodial strategies with > regard to saving personal digital archives from their fates. > Could you elaborate on the reactions of the creators of these > archives in terms of the site visit and on-site appraisal > interventions as well as to the suggestions that they manage > their own archives in particular ways? The workbook takes > the approach that post-custodial intervention done carefully > and respecting the creator's freedoms is key to the process > and would achieve an optimal result. My own experiences > acquiring digital archives have shown a range of openness to > intervention, and perhaps greater hesitation about allowing > access to digital documents than paper ones. Can you > elaborate on the experiences of the project archivists in > terms of intervention? > > Looking forward to hearing more, > Catherine > > (SISPA Chair) > > > > Catherine Hobbs, > Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language) / Archiviste, > Archives litt?raires de langue anglaise Documentary Heritage > Collection Sector / Secteur de la collection du patrimoine > documentaire Library and Archives Canada / Biblioth?que et > Archives Canada Place de la Cit?, Room / Piece 598, 550, > boul. de la Cit?, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4 > catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca T?l?phone /Telephone > 819-934-8331 T?l?copieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333 > > Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada > www.collectionscanada.gc.ca > > > _______________________________________________ > Personal_archives mailing list > Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives > From susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk Tue Nov 17 06:43:26 2009 From: susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk (Susan E Thomas) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:43:26 -0000 Subject: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan In-Reply-To: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4F1@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> References: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646636CC3A8@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF4F1@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Message-ID: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB6466397208D@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> On the subject of arrangement and description of hybrid archive... Catherine pointed to two possible scenarios: > Example: if the fonds > predominantly contained textual paper records but email was > rarely used or the computer was used to create only drafts > after annotating paper copies, this would affect the > arrangement of the hybrid archive (i.e. the computer records > might form specific series or subseries) > rather than if the > creator led a fully integrated lifestyle in which case series > might be integrated across hard copy and paper. I think I would tend to integrate the digital and the paper (in the 'intellectual arrangement' of the EAD catalogue) in both these circumstances. The Paradigm Workbook doesn't reflect practice at the Bodleian in as much as its rare for us to catalogue at item and piece level. Lower-level cataloguing is more common at the Rylands, so we were able to compare and contrast different practices during the project. It's probably more useful for me to speak to current practice in the arrangement and description of archives at the Bodleian, since this is my context of operation at present. Generally, our archival arrangement takes into consideration: a) the existing order of the material - does it provide evidence of creation/use that should be preserved? Is it comprehensible/consistent? b) anticipated uses of the collection by scholars c) storage requirements. For personal archives, an arrangement along the following lines has become quite common: 1. Diaries - sometimes split into appointment diaries and journal-style diaries 2. Correspondence - sometimes interleaved with papers; sometimes split into sub-series. 3. Literary papers 4. Personal papers 5. Biographical/family letters and papers 6. Newspaper cuttings Within those higher-level groupings, the arrangement series/sub-series according to provenance and date is typical. The arrangement tends to unite digital and paper materials created through the same activities in the same period within series/subseries, but it isn't practical to interleave digital and paper at the item level. For instance, in the hybrid archive of Barbara Castle we have a series of general correspondence as follows: - General correspondence, 1930-2002 (MSS. Castle 62-157; Castle digital 7) The shelfmarks MSS. Castle 62-157 each represent a box of paper correspondence, arranged in chronological order (here you see the impact of storage on arrangement). The covering dates of the born-digital correspondence (some 300 items) actually overlap with the paper correspondence held in boxes MSS. Castle 145-155, but because we don't create EAD catalogues to item level we cannot interleave the born-digital and paper material. Of course, we have many potential advantages with born-digital archives. One of them is that we are able to offer multiple stored 'orders' as well as orders configured on the fly through searching and faceting materials. This means that we can retain the original order of the creator (e.g. the 'disk order') AND impose an archival arrangement within the EAD finding aid, and this is exactly what we propose to do. Access to the born-digital archives will be via a browser-based interface which allows the user to browse material by the user's original order (i.e. to see which piece/s of media the file arrived on, and what was its original filepath/s was/were), to browse by the archival arrangement, and also to search (full text, metadata, and facets, etc.). It's clear that the interface to born-digital archives will provide enhanced access to materials at the item-level, far over and above what we can provide for paper items. On one level, this is marvellous. On another, we worry about the paper materials that could be missed by dint of being less accessible. This has been a concern for a while, and we are thinking about how we can direct our users to relevant material in the paper element of the archive (a bit like Amazon's, 'you might want to look at' service). Susan Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES > -----Original Message----- > From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu > [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf > Of Hobbs, Catherine > Sent: 16 November 2009 15:58 > To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first > questions for Susan > > Thanks Sue, > Two quick comments: > > "In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are not > entirely atypical in this intermingling of personal and > employer materials. You can see similar issues in anyone's > personal archive, where organisational and personal > professional records start to get intertwined." > True. Indeed, during the discussion had by SISPA on that > topic this was also felt to be the case. > > The whole concept of hybrid archives also caught my interest > and led me to wonder whether or not the arrangement of a > personal fonds might be affected by the type of hybrid > lifestyle of the creator. Example: if the fonds > predominantly contained textual paper records but email was > rarely used or the computer was used to create only drafts > after annotating paper copies, this would affect the > arrangement of the hybrid archive (i.e. the computer records > might form specific series or subseries) rather than if the > creator led a fully integrated lifestyle in which case series > might be integrated across hard copy and paper. I wondered a > lot about the arrangement decisions made in that chapter and > would love some elaboration on those types of decisions as > demonstrated by those examples. > > Catherine > From susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk Tue Nov 17 09:12:03 2009 From: susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk (Susan E Thomas) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:12:03 -0000 Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts, and hybrid personal vs. work archives In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646639720F3@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Hi Rick, Thanks for your observations. There's definitely potential for hornet's nest situations when personal/employer records get mixed up. I took a look at the link to the description of your archive. It isn't immediately obvious that it contains any digital material. Do you know why? Perhaps your (printed and digitised) email archive isn't yet ready for access? I have to admit that the process your email has gone through made me giggle, but I think it's probably quite common. I've come across this kind of scenario myself: a depositor whose staff was scanning printed word-processed documents for improved access, and even going so far as to use OCR (optical character recognition) so that they could be searchable. There's also a good deal of digitising equipment out there for more regular individuals for scanning old family photos, converting vinyl and VHS to digital, etc. I expect to see more 'digitised at home' content in our archives in the coming years. Susan Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES ________________________________ From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of RICKBARRY at aol.com Sent: 16 November 2009 22:40 To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts,and hybrid personal vs. work archives Thanks, Susan for your response to Catherine's insightful openers, which had also come to my mind. I have a related issue I'd like to put to you, but I'll submit that separately when the current issues have had a chance to be vetted. I agree with your observation that individuals will often have a mix of personal and work records in their possession, especially where they have played a personal part in the business transactions relating to work records. However, I would caution the co-joining of such records in institutional archives. Firstly, in many cases work records may have been internally designated by the organization as confidential. I'm not talking about the obvious cases of national security agencies where sensitive records should be page marked and unauthorized dissemination could be a criminal offense (in the US, NARA requires that copies of formerly security classified records in their possession be specifically page marked at time of copying to note the NARA authority declassifying them). Rather, I'm referring to so-called "Company-Confidential" or other organizations' similarly classified records that are not governed by national/local laws but rather by internal policy. Even these may be easy for the collecting institution to spot and question if the records are actually marked on each page to signify such a status. However, organizations may designate whole groups of, or all, internal communications as confidential and strictly for internal dissemination only and in some cases even restricted internal recipients without the records being individually marked. This gives rise to potential liability of the individual donor (possibly unknowingly or unthinkingly), and potentially of the collecting institution based on IPR considerations. (We have all observed emails from individuals that even with lunch dates or other ethereal emails, have a routine signature line that states that this communication is confidential and should be returned or destroyed if misdirected -- a practice that some legal experts claim would never be acceptable in a courtroom in defense of an individual if it can be demonstrated that the sender used this signature line indiscriminately instead of only for communications that clearly met the organization's security policies.) Moreover, it is highly likely that many employer records maintained by the individual were kept in violation of organizational recordkeeping policies and schedules, as most would likely have been designated for destruction after a certain period or for transfer as part of the individual's parent unit to the organization's archives. Thus, the individual might be, even unknowingly, opening him/herself to trouble sometime down the road, as might the institution receiving such records. At the least, the collecting organization could be faced with a hornet's nest as to what disposition to make upon the death of the donor, even with a carefully written donor agreement, because the donor didn't have the right to donate employer records in the first place. You asked us to share related personal experiences: When I retired from the World Bank in 1992, I donated a few thousand records covering the period 1972-1989 to the Bank Archives (which, as chief of information services, I had earlier managed). Most of them might be described as personal-Bank records in the sense that they were records of Bank processes/transactions in which I was a party, but not in the sense that I "owned" them, which I clearly did not according to well defined policy. To illustrate, some of them were 'informal' email exchanges (aka 'records') reacting to a draft policy I had written on public disclosure of information. That was a highly controversial topic in the Bank's boardroom, especially between directors from developing countries and those from industrialized countries. It was a media-hybrid set, many of which were in the form email including the first email I had ever sent using the Bank's original email system, which I had managed earlier as chief of office systems. I thought that those records would be of interest not only for content purposes, but because I knew that at that time the Archives didn't have a significant corpus of the new email record type (as distinct from a fake test set) that could be useful for my succeeding colleagues to have to "play with" in the context of developing an electronic records program, and the Archivist agreed. Ironically, those born digital emails, which were of course created in a proprietary standard email system that subsequently had to be all printed out to paper when a different vendor was selected for the replacement email system, which was in a different proprietary standard, and the two didn't talk to each other. Some time thereafter as I understand it -- you guessed it -- they were scanned back into digital form for easier access. This is an example of how organizations do sometimes have to "pay twice" to get records into digital form. I have recently thought about putting a brief description of this experience up in the Personal E-Recs section of my Website. I wouldn't ask to put up the records themselves, but rather just the description http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,conte ntMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlet s~theSitePK:29506,00.html which I hope would be authorized. My point here is that this approach to combined personal/business records dilemma might be a reasonable solution, i.e., to accept from the donor the strictly personal individual records but only the description of the 'personal/agency/company/institution' files. This would probably involve the receiving archivist/curator gently moving the donor in the direction of first donating such records to his/her organization for description. Or to accept the records initially but then return the employer records after accessioning on the grounds that they would not meet your collection policy. However this matter is handled, the collecting institution will have to treat the subject with care and sensitivity when engaging the potential donor in such a manner as not to lose his/her interest in gifting. This might possibly be presented as an ethical/legal matter and one that the donor would likely face with any recipient. Better to lose the donation than to take it with issues that may come back to bite you or your successors sometime later down the road. Regards, Rick -----Original Message----- From: Susan E Thomas [mailto:susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk] Sent: November 16, 2009 10:35 AM To: Hobbs, Catherine Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan Hello Catherine, ....The issue of personal fonds v public record is one we faced too. We also found some overlap with content held in the archives of the political parties. In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are not entirely atypical in this intermingling of personal and employer materials. You can see similar issues in anyone's personal archive, where organisational and personal professional records start to get intertwined. How transferable is the case study to different contexts? As both the Bodleian and the Rylands collect widely, this is a question that cropped up during the project. How did we think the archives of writers or scientists might be different, and what might we need to change as a result? This was not an area we could explore in the context of the project, but the Bodleian is developing hybrid (traditional + digital) archives in other areas and our experiences are growing through this process. The questions we tend to ask an individual don't change too much according to their profession, but some of the answers they give do. The commercial considerations around literary archives have the potential to frame the discussion rather differently, as do the credit and IPR issues in science and technology. I think we need more experience to draw out useful patterns, but we can point to areas that would benefit from a bit more exploration. Some of these areas touch on the records as much as the people; for instance, I'm working with a literary hybrid archive at the moment and I'd really like to see a tool that identifies whether a word processed document contains comments or track changes! I'd love to hear about others' experiences with the personal archives that contain digital materials, whether they are those of writers, scientists, or anyone else! I'm familiar with a few case studies, including the work done on the NEH grant 'Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials', and work done on scientist's archives at the British Library. Have others been working actively with born-digital personal archives? What interesting things have you discovered? Susan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091117/671293d3/attachment-0001.html From RICKBARRY at aol.com Tue Nov 17 13:35:52 2009 From: RICKBARRY at aol.com (RICKBARRY at aol.com) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:35:52 EST Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts, and hybrid pers... Message-ID: Thanks, Susan. Indeed, the Bank did use "bonded" OCR combined with scanned images of documents for many years and may still for some records. The OCR results were passed through a spell checker and used for text searching but produced the scanned image back to the searcher. Re the current access of those records, I can't say. I only know what I heard. The Bank has a tight disclosure policy so I'm not even sure I'd have access as a retiree, unless I were writing a book or such and that then would have to be vetted separately. In any case, the main proposition is that personal and employer-related records is something that the archivist/curator should handle separately and with caution. Regards, Rick In a message dated 11/17/2009 9:15:46 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk writes: Hi Rick, Thanks for your observations. There's definitely potential for hornet's nest situations when personal/employer records get mixed up. I took a look at the link to the description of your archive. It isn't immediately obvious that it contains any digital material. Do you know why? Perhaps your (printed and digitised) email archive isn't yet ready for access? I have to admit that the process your email has gone through made me giggle, but I think it's probably quite common. I've come across this kind of scenario myself: a depositor whose staff was scanning printed word-processed documents for improved access, and even going so far as to use OCR (optical character recognition) so that they could be searchable. There's also a good deal of digitising equipment out there for more regular individuals for scanning old family photos, converting vinyl and VHS to digital, etc. I expect to see more 'digitised at home' content in our archives in the coming years. Susan Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: _http://futurearchives.blogspot.com_ (http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/) Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES ____________________________________ From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of RICKBARRY at aol.com Sent: 16 November 2009 22:40 To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts,and hybrid personal vs. work archives Thanks, Susan for your response to Catherine's insightful openers, which had also come to my mind. I have a related issue I'd like to put to you, but I'll submit that separately when the current issues have had a chance to be vetted. I agree with your observation that individuals will often have a mix of personal and work records in their possession, especially where they have played a personal part in the business transactions relating to work records. However, I would caution the co-joining of such records in institutional archives. Firstly, in many cases work records may have been internally designated by the organization as confidential. I'm not talking about the obvious cases of national security agencies where sensitive records should be page marked and unauthorized dissemination could be a criminal offense (in the US, NARA requires that copies of formerly security classified records in their possession be specifically page marked at time of copying to note the NARA authority declassifying them). Rather, I'm referring to so-called "Company-Confidential" or other organizations' similarly classified records that are not governed by national/local laws but rather by internal policy. Even these may be easy for the collecting institution to spot and question if the records are actually marked on each page to signify such a status. However, organizations may designate whole groups of, or all, internal communications as confidential and strictly for internal dissemination only and in some cases even restricted internal recipients without the records being individually marked. This gives rise to potential liability of the individual donor (possibly unknowingly or unthinkingly), and potentially of the collecting institution based on IPR considerations. (We have all observed emails from individuals that even with lunch dates or other ethereal emails, have a routine signature line that states that this communication is confidential and should be returned or destroyed if misdirected -- a practice that some legal experts claim would never be acceptable in a courtroom in defense of an individual if it can be demonstrated that the sender used this signature line indiscriminately instead of only for communications that clearly met the organization's security policies.) Moreover, it is highly likely that many employer records maintained by the individual were kept in violation of organizational recordkeeping policies and schedules, as most would likely have been designated for destruction after a certain period or for transfer as part of the individual's parent unit to the organization's archives. Thus, the individual might be, even unknowingly, opening him/herself to trouble sometime down the road, as might the institution receiving such records. At the least, the collecting organization could be faced with a hornet's nest as to what disposition to make upon the death of the donor, even with a carefully written donor agreement, because the donor didn't have the right to donate employer records in the first place. You asked us to share related personal experiences: When I retired from the World Bank in 1992, I donated a few thousand records covering the period 1972-1989 to the Bank Archives (which, as chief of information services, I had earlier managed). Most of them might be described as personal-Bank records in the sense that they were records of Bank processes/transactions in which I was a party, but not in the sense that I "owned" them, which I clearly did not according to well defined policy. To illustrate, some of them were 'informal' email exchanges (aka 'records') reacting to a draft policy I had written on public disclosure of information. That was a highly controversial topic in the Bank's boardroom, especially between directors from developing countries and those from industrialized countries. It was a media-hybrid set, many of which were in the form email including the first email I had ever sent using the Bank's original email system, which I had managed earlier as chief of office systems. I thought that those records would be of interest not only for content purposes, but because I knew that at that time the Archives didn't have a significant corpus of the new email record type (as distinct from a fake test set) that could be useful for my succeeding colleagues to have to "play with" in the context of developing an electronic records program, and the Archivist agreed. Ironically, those born digital emails, which were of course created in a proprietary standard email system that subsequently had to be all printed out to paper when a different vendor was selected for the replacement email system, which was in a different proprietary standard, and the two didn't talk to each other. Some time thereafter as I understand it -- you guessed it -- they were scanned back into digital form for easier access. This is an example of how organizations do sometimes have to "pay twice" to get records into digital form. I have recently thought about putting a brief description of this experience up in the Personal E-Recs section of my Website. I wouldn't ask to put up the records themselves, but rather just the description _http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentM DK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlets~theSi tePK:29506,00.html_ (http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:4373 78~sp:servlets~theSitePK:29506,00.html) which I hope would be authorized. My point here is that this approach to combined personal/business records dilemma might be a reasonable solution, i.e., to accept from the donor the strictly personal individual records but only the description of the 'personal/agency/company/institution' files. This would probably involve the receiving archivist/curator gently moving the donor in the direction of first donating such records to his/her organization for description. Or to accept the records initially but then return the employer records after accessioning on the grounds that they would not meet your collection policy. However this matter is handled, the collecting institution will have to treat the subject with care and sensitivity when engaging the potential donor in such a manner as not to lose his/her interest in gifting. This might possibly be presented as an ethical/legal matter and one that the donor would likely face with any recipient. Better to lose the donation than to take it with issues that may come back to bite you or your successors sometime later down the road. Regards, Rick -----Original Message----- From: Susan E Thomas [mailto:susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk] Sent: November 16, 2009 10:35 AM To: Hobbs, Catherine Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan Hello Catherine, ....The issue of personal fonds v public record is one we faced too. We also found some overlap with content held in the archives of the political parties. In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are not entirely atypical in this intermingling of personal and employer materials. You can see similar issues in anyone's personal archive, where organisational and personal professional records start to get intertwined. How transferable is the case study to different contexts? As both the Bodleian and the Rylands collect widely, this is a question that cropped up during the project. How did we think the archives of writers or scientists might be different, and what might we need to change as a result? This was not an area we could explore in the context of the project, but the Bodleian is developing hybrid (traditional + digital) archives in other areas and our experiences are growing through this process. The questions we tend to ask an individual don't change too much according to their profession, but some of the answers they give do. The commercial considerations around literary archives have the potential to frame the discussion rather differently, as do the credit and IPR issues in science and technology. I think we need more experience to draw out useful patterns, but we can point to areas that would benefit from a bit more exploration. Some of these areas touch on the records as much as the people; for instance, I'm working with a literary hybrid archive at the moment and I'd really like to see a tool that identifies whether a word processed document contains comments or track changes! I'd love to hear about others' experiences with the personal archives that contain digital materials, whether they are those of writers, scientists, or anyone else! I'm familiar with a few case studies, including the work done on the NEH grant 'Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials', and work done on scientist's archives at the British Library. Have others been working actively with born-digital personal archives? What interesting things have you discovered? Susan _______________________________________________ Personal_archives mailing list Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091117/7f02a040/attachment-0001.html From rgscarter at gmail.com Tue Nov 17 14:16:19 2009 From: rgscarter at gmail.com (Rodney Carter) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:16:19 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts, and hybrid pers... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hello all, I am just getting back to work after a week off and am digesting the thoughtful first posts from Catherine, Susan & Rick. The issue of hybrid professional/personal fonds is a thorny one and I found Rick's post very interesting with regards to the potential issues that archives could face when accepting personal records which include documents from their professional life. The intertwining of personal/professional will undoubtedly prove to be even more complex as technology gets evermore sophisticated, for example with email and SMS messages sent from an individual's blackberry or other mobile device - often which are paid by the employer but are being used for personal matters as often as for work. This, of course, is not unique to digital. I heard an anecdote from a municipal archives (I cannot recall which one at the moment - I imagine similar situations have occurred in numerous instances) where the descendants of a town councilor donated the private documents to the archives and it was found that the counselor had held on to counsel minute books - the only copies of the ledgers. The archivist was able to fill in the gap of the corporate record with the donation and I imagine was able to add an interesting note in the Custodial History field (I cannot recall whether or not the descendant was able to claim the records a for a tax receipt, although I am pretty sure they wanted one and it had to be explained that the records belonged to the municipality despite being stored at the family's home for decades). With digital records we have an opportunity to be able to share records (or at least their descriptions with links to the other institutions) between archives who have been given the personal records and the corporate/government/other archives where the work-related records belong. I hope that institutions look favorably on collaboration and do not get too caught up in turf-wars. Certainly the rejoining of split fonds - I am thinking particularly of writers and artists who have given their collections to more than one institution - is now virtually possible although I don't know how much collaboration actually occurs. In my case, working for a religious congregation, I am responsible for both the personal and professional of the Sisters. I am frequently confronted with what are arguably "work" records in their private papers (typically they have been physical records - I am only now beginning to have to grapple with their digital files). This is complicated by the idea that the Sisters have given their life to the service of the Church so the lines can be fuzzy at times. No hard and fast rule has been set but where it makes sense I separate the professional records and integrate them with the Office of the Superior, etc. otherwise I hope that my descriptions will allow them to be found (making frequent use of the "Related Groups of Records" note section along with the custodial history field). Rodney On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:35 PM, wrote: > Thanks, Susan. Indeed, the Bank did use "bonded" OCR combined with > scanned images of documents for many years and may still for some records. > The OCR results were passed through a spell checker and used for text > searching but produced the scanned image back to the searcher. Re the > current access of those records, I can't say. I only know what I heard. The > Bank has a tight disclosure policy so I'm not even sure I'd have access as a > retiree, unless I were writing a book or such and that then would have to be > vetted separately. In any case, the main proposition is that personal and > employer-related records is something that the archivist/curator should > handle separately and with caution. > > Regards, > > Rick > > In a message dated 11/17/2009 9:15:46 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, > susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk writes: > > Hi Rick, > > Thanks for your observations. There's definitely potential for hornet's > nest situations when personal/employer records get mixed up. > > I took a look at the link to the description of your archive. It isn't > immediately obvious that it contains any digital material. Do you know why? > Perhaps your (printed and digitised) email archive isn't yet ready for > access? I have to admit that the process your email has gone through made me > giggle, but I think it's probably quite common. I've come across this kind > of scenario myself: a depositor whose staff was scanning printed > word-processed documents for improved access, and even going so far as to > use OCR (optical character recognition) so that they could be searchable. > There's also a good deal of digitising equipment out there for more > regular individuals for scanning old family photos, converting vinyl and VHS > to digital, etc. I expect to see more 'digitised at home' content in our > archives in the coming years. > > Susan > > Susan Thomas > Digital Archivist/Project Manager > Bodleian Library > > Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com > Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 > Post: Oxford University Library Services > Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES > > > ------------------------------ > *From:* personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto: > personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] *On Behalf Of * > RICKBARRY at aol.com > *Sent:* 16 November 2009 22:40 > *To:* personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > *Subject:* [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts,and > hybrid personal vs. work archives > > Thanks, Susan for your response to Catherine's insightful openers, which > had also come to my mind. I have a related issue I'd like to put to you, but > I'll submit that separately when the current issues have had a chance to be > vetted. > > I agree with your observation that individuals will often have a mix of > personal and work records in their possession, especially where they have > played a personal part in the business transactions relating to work > records. However, I would caution the co-joining of such records in > institutional archives. Firstly, in many cases work records may have been > internally designated by the organization as confidential. I'm not talking > about the obvious cases of national security agencies where sensitive > records should be page marked and unauthorized dissemination could be a > criminal offense (in the US, NARA requires that copies of formerly security > classified records in their possession be specifically page marked at time > of copying to note the NARA authority declassifying them). Rather, I'm > referring to so-called "Company-Confidential" or other organizations' > similarly classified records that are not governed by national/local laws > but rather by internal policy. Even these may be easy for the collecting > institution to spot and question if the records are actually marked on each > page to signify such a status. However, organizations may designate *whole > groups of, or all,* internal communications as confidential and strictly > for internal dissemination only and in some cases even restricted > internal recipients without the records being individually marked. This > gives rise to potential liability of the individual donor (possibly > unknowingly or unthinkingly), and potentially of the collecting institution > based on IPR considerations. (We have all observed emails from individuals > that even with lunch dates or other ethereal emails, have a routine > signature line that states that this communication is confidential and > should be returned or destroyed if misdirected -- a practice that some > legal experts claim would never be acceptable in a courtroom in defense of > an individual if it can be demonstrated that the sender used this signature > line indiscriminately instead of only for communications that clearly met > the organization's security policies.) Moreover, it is highly likely that > many employer records maintained by the individual were kept in violation of > organizational recordkeeping policies and schedules, as most would likely > have been designated for destruction after a certain period or for > transfer as part of the individual's parent unit to the organization's > archives. Thus, the individual might be, even unknowingly, opening > him/herself to trouble sometime down the road, as might the institution > receiving such records. At the least, the collecting organization could be > faced with a hornet's nest as to what disposition to make upon the death of > the donor, even with a carefully written donor agreement, because the donor > didn't have the right to donate employer records in the first place. > > You asked us to share related personal experiences: When I retired from > the World Bank in 1992, I donated a few thousand records covering the period > 1972-1989 to the Bank Archives (which, as chief of information services, I > had earlier managed). Most of them might be described as personal-Bank > records in the sense that they were records of Bank processes/transactions > in which I was a party, but not in the sense that I "owned" them, which I > clearly did not according to well defined policy. To illustrate, some of > them were 'informal' email exchanges (aka 'records') reacting to a draft > policy I had written on public disclosure of information. That was a highly > controversial topic in the Bank's boardroom, especially between directors > from developing countries and those from industrialized countries. It was a > media-hybrid set, many of which were in the form email including the first > email I had ever sent using the Bank's original email system, which I had > managed earlier as chief of office systems. I thought that those records > would be of interest not only for content purposes, but because I knew that > at that time the Archives didn't have a significant corpus of the new email > record type (as distinct from a fake test set) that could be useful for my > succeeding colleagues to have to "play with" in the context of developing an > electronic records program, and the Archivist agreed. Ironically, those born > digital emails, which were of course created in a proprietary standard email > system that subsequently had to be all printed out to paper when a different > vendor was selected for the replacement email system, which was in a > different proprietary standard, and the two didn't talk to each other. Some > time thereafter as I understand it -- you guessed it -- they were scanned > back into digital form for easier access. This is an example of > how organizations do sometimes have to "pay twice" to get records into > digital form. I have recently thought about putting a brief description of > this experience up in the Personal E-Recs section of my Website. I wouldn't > ask to put up the records themselves, but rather just the description > > http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlets~theSitePK:29506,00.html > which I hope would be authorized. My point here is that this approach to > combined personal/business records dilemma might be a reasonable solution, > i.e., to accept from the donor the strictly personal individual records but > only the *description* of the 'personal/agency/company/institution' files. > This would probably involve the receiving archivist/curator gently moving > the donor in the direction of first donating such records to his/her > organization for description. Or to accept the records initially but then > return the employer records after accessioning on the grounds that they > would not meet your collection policy. However this matter is handled, the > collecting institution will have to treat the subject with care and > sensitivity when engaging the potential donor in such a manner as not to > lose his/her interest in gifting. This might possibly be presented as an > ethical/legal matter and one that the donor would likely face with any > recipient. Better to lose the donation than to take it with issues that may > come back to bite you or your successors sometime later down the road. > > Regards, > > Rick > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Susan E Thomas [mailto:susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk] > Sent: November 16, 2009 10:35 AM > To: Hobbs, Catherine > Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan > > Hello Catherine, > ....The issue of personal fonds v public record is one we faced too. We > also found some overlap with content held in the archives of the political > parties. In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are not entirely > atypical in this intermingling of personal and employer materials. You can > see similar issues in anyone's personal archive, where organisational and > personal professional records start to get intertwined. > > How transferable is the case study to different contexts? As both the > Bodleian and the Rylands collect widely, this is a question that cropped up > during the project. How did we think the archives of writers or scientists > might be different, and what might we need to change as a result? This was > not an area we could explore in the context of the project, but the Bodleian > is developing hybrid (traditional + digital) archives in other areas and our > experiences are growing through this process. The questions we tend to ask > an individual don't change too much according to their profession, but some > of the answers they give do. The commercial considerations around literary > archives have the potential to frame the discussion rather differently, as > do the credit and IPR issues in science and technology. I think we need more > experience to draw out useful patterns, but we can point to areas that would > benefit from a bit more exploration. Some of these areas touch on the > records as much as the people; for instance, I'm working with a literary > hybrid archive at the moment and I'd really like to see a tool that > identifies whether a word processed document contains comments or track > changes! > > I'd love to hear about others' experiences with the personal archives that > contain digital materials, whether they are those of writers, scientists, or > anyone else! I'm familiar with a few case studies, including the work done > on the NEH grant 'Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital > Literary Materials', and work done on scientist's archives at the British > Library. Have others been working actively with born-digital personal > archives? What interesting things have you discovered? > > Susan > > > > _______________________________________________ > Personal_archives mailing list > Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives > > _______________________________________________ > Personal_archives mailing list > Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091117/d7c005db/attachment-0001.html From michael.forstrom at yale.edu Tue Nov 17 15:37:02 2009 From: michael.forstrom at yale.edu (Forstrom, Michael) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:37:02 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement Message-ID: For starters, I'd also like to publicly congratulate Susan and her colleagues on the Workbook. I'll respond to Susan's call for "other experiences" with personal archives containing digital materials and move on to discussion relating to arrangement. At the Beinecke Library we've been acquiring manuscript collections with what I've indentified as fugitive digital content (small numbers of disks) for roughly a decade. At Beinecke these disks tend to reside in the papers of writers and in the records of small presses and literary journals and they tend to contain word processing files, such as drafts of writings or letters. We've processed several personal archives containing disks and discovered that, in general, small numbers of disks and files lend themselves to item-level analysis and arrangement by content and larger numbers of disks and files lend themselves to arrangement by format. There are of course other considerations, but these are the two models we've pursued to date. We recently acquired our first real hybrid archive--a writer in mid-career. We made a macro/functional appraisal and a snapshot accession, copying files, incuding email, directly off two working machines in the writer's home. In doing so, I should add, we tested a revised Paradigm records survey and transfer protocol. We may be able to respect the original order in arrangement, though processing will be complicated by the fact that there is duplication between the machines and variations in the directories. Assuming additions to this collection, a preliminary proposal is to leave well enough alone and not integrate the digital and paper components at this time. We need to revisit this, but there is an argument for tackling this now, doing some additional appraisal, testing appraisal tools, in general, doing more so that some of the complexities of the accession, say, context provided through dialogue with the author, isn't lost or difficult to interpret at the point of future processing. So, a couple questions for Susan. First, whether any Paradigm project collections have been fully processed? And second, if you conducted any snapshot accessions as part of the project, what if any additional work was done on them in house. Other comments welcome of course. Best, Michael Forstrom Manuscript Unit Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library New Haven, CT 06520 203.432.7215 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091117/de3e9362/attachment.html From susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk Wed Nov 18 05:51:26 2009 From: susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk (Susan E Thomas) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:51:26 -0000 Subject: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646639721F6@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Hi Michael, Great to hear some more about the Beinecke's experiences. In answer to your first question, not all of the Paradigm collections have been fully processed. Those exemplars acquired from working politicians were generally quite recent in date and would not be suitable for full processing because we could not yet provide access to much of the material. The archive that has been most fully processed is that of the politician Barbara Castle (those not familiar with Castle might like to take a look at her obituary in The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/may/04/guardianobituaries.obituaries ). Castle formed a rather different case study for the project; her papers were at the Library before the project began, but her computers and disks were transferred in the first year of the project, once the Library had already appointed a cataloguer - Matthew Neely - to catalogue her archive. The catalogue is complete and our curator of modern political papers is currently determining what may be released and when, and 'open' material is gradually being made available to researchers through this process. One of futureArch's developers - Pete Cliff - has been working to develop a researcher interface for the 'open' component of Castle's digital items. While we have made some digital materials accessible to researchers in the past, we have yet to do this via a proper interface. Once Pete's work goes into reading rooms, we will have our first real opportunity to see how scholars interact with this kind of hybrid archive and I hope to feed this interaction into the development process for refining our researcher interfaces. Question number two. Yes, we did make a number of snapshot accessions during the project and the final report made to our funder (JISC) provides some information on those case studies (see http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/projectdocs/jiscreports/ParadigmFinalReportv1. pdf). For one creator, this amounted to three snapshots in just over a year. In practice the Library would be unlikely to take snapshots quite so frequently, but this is what a project timeframe produces. The Library is now working with the literary press Clutag, from which we also take snapshot hybrid accessions - these come in roughly annually and the timing tends to be tied to the publication of the Press' Archipelago magazine. Under our current futureArch project, we are processing many of our legacy hybrid archives for access and Clutag is one of those we're working on. As part of that process, we have recently captured* all the Clutag digital material received in the past three years and will be surveying and cataloguing this alongside the papers received with it. For surveying born-digital material, we are making more and more use of 'digital forensic' techniques, more typically associated with the police, FBI, fraud office, etc., rather than archives and libraries. The individual who has pioneered their use in the context of personal archives is Jeremy John, of the British Library, who has been a terrific collaborator (see his 2008 iPRES paper at http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008/presentations_day1/09_John.pdf). Forensic analysis software is designed to discover relevant evidence among vast quantities of data and supports a number of techniques useful to archivists and curators. So, how is it useful? Well, it helps with a number of things: 1. Provides an infrastructure within which to explore materials while maintaining authenticity - these environments have to produce evidence that can stand up in court 2. Identifying duplicates across different media or snapshot accessions 3. Identifying similar files (not something we've tested much yet, but could have huge potential for literary drafts) 4. Availability of bookmarking and annotation tools to support arrangement 5. Ability to preview a wide range of file formats 6. Ability to filter data, including the option to ignore non-archival data (such as clipart or application software) 7. Ability to recover 'deleted' data (yes, there are ethical issues here that need to be addressed) 8. Ability to export files and metadata in CSV format 9. Pre-configured data filters that allow discovery of certain file types that might be in unexpected locations on a hard disk drive Moving away from the issue of appraisal and analysis for a moment and returning to the issue of transfer. I'm pleased to hear that the Beinecke has been able to adapt the Paradigm survey and transfer protocols; are you able to say some more about what changes you made, what the experience was like, and perhaps tell us something about the email system you encountered, and how you acquired the email from it? If others have experiences of 'digital transfer' that they are willing to share, I'm sure many of us would find that useful. Best, Susan * By 'captured' I mean we have created 'disk images' of the material given to us on CD and floppy disk. These disk images can be used by forensic tools and can be mounted on computers as if they were the disk in question. Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES ________________________________ From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Forstrom, Michael Sent: 17 November 2009 20:37 To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement For starters, I'd also like to publicly congratulate Susan and her colleagues on the Workbook. I'll respond to Susan's call for "other experiences" with personal archives containing digital materials and move on to discussion relating to arrangement. At the Beinecke Library we've been acquiring manuscript collections with what I've indentified as fugitive digital content (small numbers of disks) for roughly a decade. At Beinecke these disks tend to reside in the papers of writers and in the records of small presses and literary journals and they tend to contain word processing files, such as drafts of writings or letters. We've processed several personal archives containing disks and discovered that, in general, small numbers of disks and files lend themselves to item-level analysis and arrangement by content and larger numbers of disks and files lend themselves to arrangement by format. There are of course other considerations, but these are the two models we've pursued to date. We recently acquired our first real hybrid archive--a writer in mid-career. We made a macro/functional appraisal and a snapshot accession, copying files, incuding email, directly off two working machines in the writer's home. In doing so, I should add, we tested a revised Paradigm records survey and transfer protocol. We may be able to respect the original order in arrangement, though processing will be complicated by the fact that there is duplication between the machines and variations in the directories. Assuming additions to this collection, a preliminary proposal is to leave well enough alone and not integrate the digital and paper components at this time. We need to revisit this, but there is an argument for tackling this now, doing some additional appraisal, testing appraisal tools, in general, doing more so that some of the complexities of the accession, say, context provided through dialogue with the author, isn't lost or difficult to interpret at the point of future processing. So, a couple questions for Susan. First, whether any Paradigm project collections have been fully processed? And second, if you conducted any snapshot accessions as part of the project, what if any additional work was done on them in house. Other comments welcome of course. Best, Michael Forstrom Manuscript Unit Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library New Haven, CT 06520 203.432.7215 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091118/d6b77e01/attachment-0001.html From susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk Wed Nov 18 08:24:52 2009 From: susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk (Susan E Thomas) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:24:52 -0000 Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts, and hybrid pers... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB64663972257@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Hello Rodney, Your point about who owns the hardware, or the service account, is a good one. I think we also need to be mindful of how communication technologies are changing professional and personal lives. For example, a structured working week is arguably no longer necessary in some roles: with the help of technology, individuals can arrange their time/location between personal and professional activities much more flexibly, potentially benefiting themselves, their family and their employer. As you point out, these kinds of changes could well to lead to even greater mixing of personal/professional and employer materials. You mentioned email and text services paid for by the employer, but it's also common for professionals to use third-party online services where the account is a personal one: the material is not hosted, or controlled, by their employer but it's very likely used for work purposes in 'work time' and 'personal time'. Will employers ever be able to regain 'control'? Should they want to? Does it depend? It seems unlikely that individuals will want to relinquish use of these kinds of services, which are more attractive and useful than corporate offerings (compare MS Outlook to Google's toolset, including Google Wave - http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html). Moreover, individuals are getting used to being in 'control' themselves. Some organisations may be able (and may have to) lock down in response, but the question of locking down or not is more complex for those that don't necessarily need to - the benefits that these third-party technologies bring probably outweigh the risks they pose. Beyond the intermingling of personal and employer materials, we should also be concerned about the intermingling of information created/used by different members of a household. Imagine a home PC containing material relating to the parents' different work activities alongside the games and chit chat of their children, and perhaps traces of use by an occasional guest. When working with hard disk drives, archivists need to be able to tie content to specific individuals and purge material that a depositor never intended to give us. I wonder if this problem will last too much longer though. I suspect that the idea of the 'family computer' is probably in decline (though I've no evidence to prove it); surely it's becoming increasingly likely (in families of adequate means) to find adults and children using personal devices, whether these are mobiles, PCs or laptops? They may also be more likely to store data in web services rather than on the local disk or a piece of media. Thanks for your comments on organising the personal and organisational records of the congregation. This is an interesting case; the personal commitment of the Sisters to the Church certainly makes the relationship between the personal and the organisational rather different. That said, I think that your approach to managing the different steams of records may well be similar to others working for 'in-house' rather than 'collecting' archives. It would be interesting to hear more about the kinds of personal records that the Sisters give to the archive. What do they do digitally, and what remains on paper? Best, Susan Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES ________________________________ From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Rodney Carter Sent: 17 November 2009 19:16 To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts,and hybrid pers... Hello all, I am just getting back to work after a week off and am digesting the thoughtful first posts from Catherine, Susan & Rick. The issue of hybrid professional/personal fonds is a thorny one and I found Rick's post very interesting with regards to the potential issues that archives could face when accepting personal records which include documents from their professional life. The intertwining of personal/professional will undoubtedly prove to be even more complex as technology gets evermore sophisticated, for example with email and SMS messages sent from an individual's blackberry or other mobile device - often which are paid by the employer but are being used for personal matters as often as for work. This, of course, is not unique to digital. I heard an anecdote from a municipal archives (I cannot recall which one at the moment - I imagine similar situations have occurred in numerous instances) where the descendants of a town councilor donated the private documents to the archives and it was found that the counselor had held on to counsel minute books - the only copies of the ledgers. The archivist was able to fill in the gap of the corporate record with the donation and I imagine was able to add an interesting note in the Custodial History field (I cannot recall whether or not the descendant was able to claim the records a for a tax receipt, although I am pretty sure they wanted one and it had to be explained that the records belonged to the municipality despite being stored at the family's home for decades). With digital records we have an opportunity to be able to share records (or at least their descriptions with links to the other institutions) between archives who have been given the personal records and the corporate/government/other archives where the work-related records belong. I hope that institutions look favorably on collaboration and do not get too caught up in turf-wars. Certainly the rejoining of split fonds - I am thinking particularly of writers and artists who have given their collections to more than one institution - is now virtually possible although I don't know how much collaboration actually occurs. In my case, working for a religious congregation, I am responsible for both the personal and professional of the Sisters. I am frequently confronted with what are arguably "work" records in their private papers (typically they have been physical records - I am only now beginning to have to grapple with their digital files). This is complicated by the idea that the Sisters have given their life to the service of the Church so the lines can be fuzzy at times. No hard and fast rule has been set but where it makes sense I separate the professional records and integrate them with the Office of the Superior, etc. otherwise I hope that my descriptions will allow them to be found (making frequent use of the "Related Groups of Records" note section along with the custodial history field). Rodney On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:35 PM, wrote: Thanks, Susan. Indeed, the Bank did use "bonded" OCR combined with scanned images of documents for many years and may still for some records. The OCR results were passed through a spell checker and used for text searching but produced the scanned image back to the searcher. Re the current access of those records, I can't say. I only know what I heard. The Bank has a tight disclosure policy so I'm not even sure I'd have access as a retiree, unless I were writing a book or such and that then would have to be vetted separately. In any case, the main proposition is that personal and employer-related records is something that the archivist/curator should handle separately and with caution. Regards, Rick In a message dated 11/17/2009 9:15:46 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk writes: Hi Rick, Thanks for your observations. There's definitely potential for hornet's nest situations when personal/employer records get mixed up. I took a look at the link to the description of your archive. It isn't immediately obvious that it contains any digital material. Do you know why? Perhaps your (printed and digitised) email archive isn't yet ready for access? I have to admit that the process your email has gone through made me giggle, but I think it's probably quite common. I've come across this kind of scenario myself: a depositor whose staff was scanning printed word-processed documents for improved access, and even going so far as to use OCR (optical character recognition) so that they could be searchable. There's also a good deal of digitising equipment out there for more regular individuals for scanning old family photos, converting vinyl and VHS to digital, etc. I expect to see more 'digitised at home' content in our archives in the coming years. Susan Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES ________________________________ From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of RICKBARRY at aol.com Sent: 16 November 2009 22:40 To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts,and hybrid personal vs. work archives Thanks, Susan for your response to Catherine's insightful openers, which had also come to my mind. I have a related issue I'd like to put to you, but I'll submit that separately when the current issues have had a chance to be vetted. I agree with your observation that individuals will often have a mix of personal and work records in their possession, especially where they have played a personal part in the business transactions relating to work records. However, I would caution the co-joining of such records in institutional archives. Firstly, in many cases work records may have been internally designated by the organization as confidential. I'm not talking about the obvious cases of national security agencies where sensitive records should be page marked and unauthorized dissemination could be a criminal offense (in the US, NARA requires that copies of formerly security classified records in their possession be specifically page marked at time of copying to note the NARA authority declassifying them). Rather, I'm referring to so-called "Company-Confidential" or other organizations' similarly classified records that are not governed by national/local laws but rather by internal policy. Even these may be easy for the collecting institution to spot and question if the records are actually marked on each page to signify such a status. However, organizations may designate whole groups of, or all, internal communications as confidential and strictly for internal dissemination only and in some cases even restricted internal recipients without the records being individually marked. This gives rise to potential liability of the individual donor (possibly unknowingly or unthinkingly), and potentially of the collecting institution based on IPR considerations. (We have all observed emails from individuals that even with lunch dates or other ethereal emails, have a routine signature line that states that this communication is confidential and should be returned or destroyed if misdirected -- a practice that some legal experts claim would never be acceptable in a courtroom in defense of an individual if it can be demonstrated that the sender used this signature line indiscriminately instead of only for communications that clearly met the organization's security policies.) Moreover, it is highly likely that many employer records maintained by the individual were kept in violation of organizational recordkeeping policies and schedules, as most would likely have been designated for destruction after a certain period or for transfer as part of the individual's parent unit to the organization's archives. Thus, the individual might be, even unknowingly, opening him/herself to trouble sometime down the road, as might the institution receiving such records. At the least, the collecting organization could be faced with a hornet's nest as to what disposition to make upon the death of the donor, even with a carefully written donor agreement, because the donor didn't have the right to donate employer records in the first place. You asked us to share related personal experiences: When I retired from the World Bank in 1992, I donated a few thousand records covering the period 1972-1989 to the Bank Archives (which, as chief of information services, I had earlier managed). Most of them might be described as personal-Bank records in the sense that they were records of Bank processes/transactions in which I was a party, but not in the sense that I "owned" them, which I clearly did not according to well defined policy. To illustrate, some of them were 'informal' email exchanges (aka 'records') reacting to a draft policy I had written on public disclosure of information. That was a highly controversial topic in the Bank's boardroom, especially between directors from developing countries and those from industrialized countries. It was a media-hybrid set, many of which were in the form email including the first email I had ever sent using the Bank's original email system, which I had managed earlier as chief of office systems. I thought that those records would be of interest not only for content purposes, but because I knew that at that time the Archives didn't have a significant corpus of the new email record type (as distinct from a fake test set) that could be useful for my succeeding colleagues to have to "play with" in the context of developing an electronic records program, and the Archivist agreed. Ironically, those born digital emails, which were of course created in a proprietary standard email system that subsequently had to be all printed out to paper when a different vendor was selected for the replacement email system, which was in a different proprietary standard, and the two didn't talk to each other. Some time thereafter as I understand it -- you guessed it -- they were scanned back into digital form for easier access. This is an example of how organizations do sometimes have to "pay twice" to get records into digital form. I have recently thought about putting a brief description of this experience up in the Personal E-Recs section of my Website. I wouldn't ask to put up the records themselves, but rather just the description http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,conte ntMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlet s~theSitePK:29506,00.html which I hope would be authorized. My point here is that this approach to combined personal/business records dilemma might be a reasonable solution, i.e., to accept from the donor the strictly personal individual records but only the description of the 'personal/agency/company/institution' files. This would probably involve the receiving archivist/curator gently moving the donor in the direction of first donating such records to his/her organization for description. Or to accept the records initially but then return the employer records after accessioning on the grounds that they would not meet your collection policy. However this matter is handled, the collecting institution will have to treat the subject with care and sensitivity when engaging the potential donor in such a manner as not to lose his/her interest in gifting. This might possibly be presented as an ethical/legal matter and one that the donor would likely face with any recipient. Better to lose the donation than to take it with issues that may come back to bite you or your successors sometime later down the road. Regards, Rick -----Original Message----- From: Susan E Thomas [mailto:susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk] Sent: November 16, 2009 10:35 AM To: Hobbs, Catherine Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan Hello Catherine, ....The issue of personal fonds v public record is one we faced too. We also found some overlap with content held in the archives of the political parties. In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are not entirely atypical in this intermingling of personal and employer materials. You can see similar issues in anyone's personal archive, where organisational and personal professional records start to get intertwined. How transferable is the case study to different contexts? As both the Bodleian and the Rylands collect widely, this is a question that cropped up during the project. How did we think the archives of writers or scientists might be different, and what might we need to change as a result? This was not an area we could explore in the context of the project, but the Bodleian is developing hybrid (traditional + digital) archives in other areas and our experiences are growing through this process. The questions we tend to ask an individual don't change too much according to their profession, but some of the answers they give do. The commercial considerations around literary archives have the potential to frame the discussion rather differently, as do the credit and IPR issues in science and technology. I think we need more experience to draw out useful patterns, but we can point to areas that would benefit from a bit more exploration. Some of these areas touch on the records as much as the people; for instance, I'm working with a literary hybrid archive at the moment and I'd really like to see a tool that identifies whether a word processed document contains comments or track changes! I'd love to hear about others' experiences with the personal archives that contain digital materials, whether they are those of writers, scientists, or anyone else! I'm familiar with a few case studies, including the work done on the NEH grant 'Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials', and work done on scientist's archives at the British Library. Have others been working actively with born-digital personal archives? What interesting things have you discovered? Susan _______________________________________________ Personal_archives mailing list Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives _______________________________________________ Personal_archives mailing list Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091118/9208fdf8/attachment-0001.html From RICKBARRY at aol.com Wed Nov 18 19:47:35 2009 From: RICKBARRY at aol.com (RICKBARRY at aol.com) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:47:35 EST Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts, and hybrid per... Message-ID: Excellent followups to Catherine's first probe. I believe that the social aspects of IT govern recordkeeping much more than technology or where the archives & records communities, and more broadly in the information management communities, would like to see us all go. I.e., we must adapt to changing social and work patterns rather than the other way around. And that, especially in the private sector, employers are gathering the fruits of their seeds in this respect -- including the bad fruit.Some have now succeeded in virtually eliminating the borders between work, family and play time in the interest of getting more than their 8 hours of work from employees, especially in the US. Which in turn is increasingly blurring the lines among recordmaking and recordkeeping technologies. Probably the most extreme case of this is the "womb-to-tomb" Google organization, where it provides free food, work socializing, entertainment and even resting/sleeping accommodations for its employees 24/7 -- and, oh, did I mention, work too? As Susan points out, the genie may well already be out of the jar forever as the PC becomes less and less the engine of recordmaking in favor of hand-held devices that now have even lite word processing capabilities. They can even be used for...making phone calls! As you may know, President Obama made it clear on day-1 that he intended to continue to use his Blackberry for both personal and "business" communications -- in his case, the business of governing the Executive Branch of United States, and challenging industry to give him a secure way of doing that, to which industry has already responded. So we might postulate that we must adapt to a world in which virtually all IT applications are potentially recordmaking systems. And while national governments are trying to adapt to this world, e.g., with NARA's Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system, we are way behind in t hinking through the implications of these developments for personal IT and e-recs. This makes the work of Paradigm all the more important and timely. Susan's comments about the likely decline of "family computers": We see this already happening. My son says that if I want to get in touch with my grandchildren in a hurry when they aren't present, the best way is texting, because they don't "do" email any more and don't often use PCs. The older among them will soon be in the workplace and not long thereafter governing the kind of recordmaking technologies used. Since 9/11, most parents have acquired mobile phones for even their youngest school children. In a short piece in the Dec '09 issue MAXIMUMPC Mag, the editor says that of the 4 PC-like machines he presently uses, one of them probably is not a PC, but his smartphone now has all the attributes (and apps) of a PC. Despite these trends, in response to Susan's question, I think it really does depend. As with other policy issues, with co-mingling of records created on personal and employer-based systems and with different degrees of early adoption of IT in different venues, there is no one-size-fits all response. What will be most appropriate in one country's legal system at one time, may not in another. Clearly the implications are different among organizations in local governments, national security and other national agencies, non-profits such as higher ed and religious, and the great variety of private sector ones. One thing, in the US at least or with other countries doing serious business here, is that all such communications -- whether or not they are records -- are discoverable as potential evidence in a court of law. Scheduling of records, whatever technology is used to create them, in part has the purpose of destroying records that are no longer needed (including for later, potential litigation purposes). If records continue to be accessible from places other than the "offices of record", then the effort to properly schedule destroyed according to established schedules, those scheduling practices become rather moot. This relates to the Rodney's good observations regarding multiple archive replications in different collecting institutions. After the 1st terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in '93, the archivist of the managing tenant of the building, the city-like NY Port Authority put out a call to archivists to scour their records to see if their organization might have received or sent documents to the Authority and asked for copies to help rebuild Port Authority records lost in that attack. This also occurred with the city of New Orleans after the tragic hurricane there destroyed records of several agencies, including the local courts, police, city birth and marriage records office and social services agencies. But these were cases in which the other organizations had official communications with the Port Authority and New Orleans agencies. With personal collections, unless individuals have received services from such organizations, this likely will not be the case. Again making hybrid personal/employer records thin ice on which to skate. All of this also makes one think about another aspect -- the relevance of "original order" in digital collections. What it all suggests, is that it is important for organizations to have clearly spelled out policies so that employees know who owns what and what is expected of them during and after their employment, and a means for the organization to be able to demonstrate that the policy is routinely read and understood by all new personnel and is part of the exit processing for terminated employees. Some organizations, especially those with special product liability concerns, may require such re-reads annually by all employees with signed statements to this effect, which themselves become important organizational records. Regards, Rick In a message dated 11/18/2009 8:29:42 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, susan .thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk writes: I think we also need to be mindful of how communication technologies are changing professional and personal lives. For example, a structured working week is arguably no longer necessary in some roles: with the help of technology, individuals can arrange their time/location between personal and professional activities much more flexibly, potentially benefiting themselves, their family and their employer. As you point out, these kinds of changes could well to lead to even greater mixing of personal/professional and employer materials. You mentioned email and text services paid for by the employer, but it's also common for professionals to use third-party online services where the account is a personal one: the material is not hosted, or controlled, by their employer but it's very likely used for work purposes in 'work time' and 'personal time'. Will employers ever be able to regain 'control'? Should they want to? Does it depend? It seems unlikely that individuals will want to relinquish use of these kinds of services, which are more attractive and useful than corporate offerings (compare MS Outlook to Google's toolset, including Google Wave - _http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html_ (http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html) ). Moreover, individuals are getting used to being in 'control' themselves. Some organisations may be able (and may have to) lock down in response, but the question of locking down or not is more complex for those that don't necessarily need to - the benefits that these third-party technologies bring probably outweigh the risks they pose. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091118/4d40ff50/attachment.html From michael.forstrom at yale.edu Thu Nov 19 12:45:41 2009 From: michael.forstrom at yale.edu (Forstrom, Michael) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:45:41 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement In-Reply-To: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646639721F6@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> References: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646639721F6@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Message-ID: Thanks, Susan, for pointing to the final report and for enumerating the benefits to digital forensics techniques. I'll respond to your questions, Susan, since I'm not sure I'll have another chance this week. I agree that there is much to be gained from sharing case studies, though I suspect most of this will be old news to you. We made minor revisions to the Paradigm records survey (at http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/appendices/records-survey.html), tailoring it more to authors (see the attached draft, though we may have sent a different version). We emailed the survey to the author, with an accompanying letter, prior to making a site visit, and then, on the day of the survey, we worked through the document with him. Some first-time field observations: it was a challenge to get the author to focus on the survey (the document and his machines) and to get accurate information and, upon later review, I felt I didn't get enough detail in my survey notes. I have found myself going back to the author to fill in gaps and/or clarify things and, thankfully, he has been very accomodating. One lesson learned: though we tweaked the survey for authors who are most likely working independently, outside an institutional/networked environment, I think we need to go into future surveys prepared to respond to more complicated environments. As far as the transfer is concerned, we largely followed Paradigm protocol for removable media, minus the encryption software/check. We sought to copy files preserving the directory structure, to run a fixity check, and to identify a non-invasive method (since we were taking copies from the author's working machines). We used an external hard-drive with USB connector, a terminal/command line code for a recursive md5, and a terminal/command line code for a hash comparison. Though we haven't sufficiently investigated digital forensics options yet, we did also try to get a disk image. Interestingly, it didn't work. One obvious lession here is that the work requires collaboration. In our case, between curatorial, archival, and IT staff. The work also requires some technical testing/troubleshooting. I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that a programmer at another institution (Peter Hornsby, Emory) provided the command line code for the recursive md5. We also copied the author's Entourage email files (the "Main Indentity"). We've had only preliminary discussion about how to preserve it, including an exchange with Riccardo Ferrante of CERP (see http://siarchives.si.edu/cerp/parserdownload.htm). Regards, Michael From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Susan E Thomas Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 5:51 AM To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement Hi Michael, Great to hear some more about the Beinecke's experiences. In answer to your first question, not all of the Paradigm collections have been fully processed. Those exemplars acquired from working politicians were generally quite recent in date and would not be suitable for full processing because we could not yet provide access to much of the material. The archive that has been most fully processed is that of the politician Barbara Castle (those not familiar with Castle might like to take a look at her obituary in The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/may/04/guardianobituaries.obituaries). Castle formed a rather different case study for the project; her papers were at the Library before the project began, but her computers and disks were transferred in the first year of the project, once the Library had already appointed a cataloguer - Matthew Neely - to catalogue her archive. The catalogue is complete and our curator of modern political papers is currently determining what may be released and when, and 'open' material is gradually being made available to researchers through this process. One of futureArch's developers - Pete Cliff - has been working to develop a researcher interface for the 'open' component of Castle's digital items. While we have made some digital materials accessible to researchers in the past, we have yet to do this via a proper interface. Once Pete's work goes into reading rooms, we will have our first real opportunity to see how scholars interact with this kind of hybrid archive and I hope to feed this interaction into the development process for refining our researcher interfaces. Question number two. Yes, we did make a number of snapshot accessions during the project and the final report made to our funder (JISC) provides some information on those case studies (see http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/projectdocs/jiscreports/ParadigmFinalReportv1.pdf). For one creator, this amounted to three snapshots in just over a year. In practice the Library would be unlikely to take snapshots quite so frequently, but this is what a project timeframe produces. The Library is now working with the literary press Clutag, from which we also take snapshot hybrid accessions - these come in roughly annually and the timing tends to be tied to the publication of the Press' Archipelago magazine. Under our current futureArch project, we are processing many of our legacy hybrid archives for access and Clutag is one of those we're working on. As part of that process, we have recently captured* all the Clutag digital material received in the past three years and will be surveying and cataloguing this alongside the papers received with it. For surveying born-digital material, we are making more and more use of 'digital forensic' techniques, more typically associated with the police, FBI, fraud office, etc., rather than archives and libraries. The individual who has pioneered their use in the context of personal archives is Jeremy John, of the British Library, who has been a terrific collaborator (see his 2008 iPRES paper at http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008/presentations_day1/09_John.pdf). Forensic analysis software is designed to discover relevant evidence among vast quantities of data and supports a number of techniques useful to archivists and curators. So, how is it useful? Well, it helps with a number of things: 1. Provides an infrastructure within which to explore materials while maintaining authenticity - these environments have to produce evidence that can stand up in court 2. Identifying duplicates across different media or snapshot accessions 3. Identifying similar files (not something we've tested much yet, but could have huge potential for literary drafts) 4. Availability of bookmarking and annotation tools to support arrangement 5. Ability to preview a wide range of file formats 6. Ability to filter data, including the option to ignore non-archival data (such as clipart or application software) 7. Ability to recover 'deleted' data (yes, there are ethical issues here that need to be addressed) 8. Ability to export files and metadata in CSV format 9. Pre-configured data filters that allow discovery of certain file types that might be in unexpected locations on a hard disk drive Moving away from the issue of appraisal and analysis for a moment and returning to the issue of transfer. I'm pleased to hear that the Beinecke has been able to adapt the Paradigm survey and transfer protocols; are you able to say some more about what changes you made, what the experience was like, and perhaps tell us something about the email system you encountered, and how you acquired the email from it? If others have experiences of 'digital transfer' that they are willing to share, I'm sure many of us would find that useful. Best, Susan * By 'captured' I mean we have created 'disk images' of the material given to us on CD and floppy disk. These disk images can be used by forensic tools and can be mounted on computers as if they were the disk in question. Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES ________________________________ From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Forstrom, Michael Sent: 17 November 2009 20:37 To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement For starters, I'd also like to publicly congratulate Susan and her colleagues on the Workbook. I'll respond to Susan's call for "other experiences" with personal archives containing digital materials and move on to discussion relating to arrangement. At the Beinecke Library we've been acquiring manuscript collections with what I've indentified as fugitive digital content (small numbers of disks) for roughly a decade. At Beinecke these disks tend to reside in the papers of writers and in the records of small presses and literary journals and they tend to contain word processing files, such as drafts of writings or letters. We've processed several personal archives containing disks and discovered that, in general, small numbers of disks and files lend themselves to item-level analysis and arrangement by content and larger numbers of disks and files lend themselves to arrangement by format. There are of course other considerations, but these are the two models we've pursued to date. We recently acquired our first real hybrid archive--a writer in mid-career. We made a macro/functional appraisal and a snapshot accession, copying files, incuding email, directly off two working machines in the writer's home. In doing so, I should add, we tested a revised Paradigm records survey and transfer protocol. We may be able to respect the original order in arrangement, though processing will be complicated by the fact that there is duplication between the machines and variations in the directories. Assuming additions to this collection, a preliminary proposal is to leave well enough alone and not integrate the digital and paper components at this time. We need to revisit this, but there is an argument for tackling this now, doing some additional appraisal, testing appraisal tools, in general, doing more so that some of the complexities of the accession, say, context provided through dialogue with the author, isn't lost or difficult to interpret at the point of future processing. So, a couple questions for Susan. First, whether any Paradigm project collections have been fully processed? And second, if you conducted any snapshot accessions as part of the project, what if any additional work was done on them in house. Other comments welcome of course. Best, Michael Forstrom Manuscript Unit Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library New Haven, CT 06520 203.432.7215 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091119/1d3bdd52/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Paradigm survey revised.doc Type: application/msword Size: 36352 bytes Desc: Paradigm survey revised.doc Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091119/1d3bdd52/attachment-0001.doc From susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk Thu Nov 19 13:12:43 2009 From: susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk (Susan E Thomas) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:12:43 -0000 Subject: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement References: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646639721F6@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Message-ID: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB646636CC3CD@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Thanks, Michael. That's really interesting. Like you, I've found that it's often quite difficult to get all the information you need in a single visit. Where possible, I would definitely recommend at least one survey visit plus follow-up correspondence before attempting transfer. The process is very much helped by a patient and/or keen depositor. I've discovered that the process is slightly different every time too, even with the same depositor. Perhaps this is one reason why IT admins like a standard 'image' to be used across organisational PCs - that way, at least they know what they're looking at! I can reassure you that you're not alone in experiencing difficulty with the survey. I find it's not alway helpful to give the depositor the survey document (judgment call); I tend to use it more as a prompt sheet, to try to make sure I cover everything. The questions often need to be re-phrased on the fly as you explore the environment and start to get a grasp of the language the depositor uses when describing their materials and their digital environment. Not altogether different from surveying a paper archive in that respect. Susan -----Original Message----- From: Forstrom, Michael [mailto:michael.forstrom at yale.edu] Sent: Thu 19/11/2009 5:45 PM To: Susan E Thomas; Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement Thanks, Susan, for pointing to the final report and for enumerating the benefits to digital forensics techniques. I'll respond to your questions, Susan, since I'm not sure I'll have another chance this week. I agree that there is much to be gained from sharing case studies, though I suspect most of this will be old news to you. We made minor revisions to the Paradigm records survey (at http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/appendices/records-survey.html), tailoring it more to authors (see the attached draft, though we may have sent a different version). We emailed the survey to the author, with an accompanying letter, prior to making a site visit, and then, on the day of the survey, we worked through the document with him. Some first-time field observations: it was a challenge to get the author to focus on the survey (the document and his machines) and to get accurate information and, upon later review, I felt I didn't get enough detail in my survey notes. I have found myself going back to the author to fill in gaps and/or clarify things and, thankfully, he has been very accomodating. One lesson learned: though we tweaked the survey for authors who are most likely working independently, outside an institutional/networked environment, I think we need to go into future surveys prepared to respond to more complicated environments. As far as the transfer is concerned, we largely followed Paradigm protocol for removable media, minus the encryption software/check. We sought to copy files preserving the directory structure, to run a fixity check, and to identify a non-invasive method (since we were taking copies from the author's working machines). We used an external hard-drive with USB connector, a terminal/command line code for a recursive md5, and a terminal/command line code for a hash comparison. Though we haven't sufficiently investigated digital forensics options yet, we did also try to get a disk image. Interestingly, it didn't work. One obvious lession here is that the work requires collaboration. In our case, between curatorial, archival, and IT staff. The work also requires some technical testing/troubleshooting. I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that a programmer at another institution (Peter Hornsby, Emory) provided the command line code for the recursive md5. We also copied the author's Entourage email files (the "Main Indentity"). We've had only preliminary discussion about how to preserve it, including an exchange with Riccardo Ferrante of CERP (see http://siarchives.si.edu/cerp/parserdownload.htm). Regards, Michael From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Susan E Thomas Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 5:51 AM To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement Hi Michael, Great to hear some more about the Beinecke's experiences. In answer to your first question, not all of the Paradigm collections have been fully processed. Those exemplars acquired from working politicians were generally quite recent in date and would not be suitable for full processing because we could not yet provide access to much of the material. The archive that has been most fully processed is that of the politician Barbara Castle (those not familiar with Castle might like to take a look at her obituary in The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/may/04/guardianobituaries.obituaries ). Castle formed a rather different case study for the project; her papers were at the Library before the project began, but her computers and disks were transferred in the first year of the project, once the Library had already appointed a cataloguer - Matthew Neely - to catalogue her archive. The catalogue is complete and our curator of modern political papers is currently determining what may be released and when, and 'open' material is gradually being made available to researchers through this process. One of futureArch's developers - Pete Cliff - has been working to develop a researcher interface for the 'open' component of Castle's digital items. While we have made some digital materials accessible to researchers in the past, we have yet to do this via a proper interface. Once Pete's work goes into reading rooms, we will have our first real opportunity to see how scholars interact with this kind of hybrid archive and I hope to feed this interaction into the development process for refining our researcher interfaces. Question number two. Yes, we did make a number of snapshot accessions during the project and the final report made to our funder (JISC) provides some information on those case studies (see http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/projectdocs/jiscreports/ParadigmFinalReportv1. pdf). For one creator, this amounted to three snapshots in just over a year. In practice the Library would be unlikely to take snapshots quite so frequently, but this is what a project timeframe produces. The Library is now working with the literary press Clutag, from which we also take snapshot hybrid accessions - these come in roughly annually and the timing tends to be tied to the publication of the Press' Archipelago magazine. Under our current futureArch project, we are processing many of our legacy hybrid archives for access and Clutag is one of those we're working on. As part of that process, we have recently captured* all the Clutag digital material received in the past three years and will be surveying and cataloguing this alongside the papers received with it. For surveying born-digital material, we are making more and more use of 'digital forensic' techniques, more typically associated with the police, FBI, fraud office, etc., rather than archives and libraries. The individual who has pioneered their use in the context of personal archives is Jeremy John, of the British Library, who has been a terrific collaborator (see his 2008 iPRES paper at http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008/presentations_day1/09_John.pdf). Forensic analysis software is designed to discover relevant evidence among vast quantities of data and supports a number of techniques useful to archivists and curators. So, how is it useful? Well, it helps with a number of things: 1. Provides an infrastructure within which to explore materials while maintaining authenticity - these environments have to produce evidence that can stand up in court 2. Identifying duplicates across different media or snapshot accessions 3. Identifying similar files (not something we've tested much yet, but could have huge potential for literary drafts) 4. Availability of bookmarking and annotation tools to support arrangement 5. Ability to preview a wide range of file formats 6. Ability to filter data, including the option to ignore non-archival data (such as clipart or application software) 7. Ability to recover 'deleted' data (yes, there are ethical issues here that need to be addressed) 8. Ability to export files and metadata in CSV format 9. Pre-configured data filters that allow discovery of certain file types that might be in unexpected locations on a hard disk drive Moving away from the issue of appraisal and analysis for a moment and returning to the issue of transfer. I'm pleased to hear that the Beinecke has been able to adapt the Paradigm survey and transfer protocols; are you able to say some more about what changes you made, what the experience was like, and perhaps tell us something about the email system you encountered, and how you acquired the email from it? If others have experiences of 'digital transfer' that they are willing to share, I'm sure many of us would find that useful. Best, Susan * By 'captured' I mean we have created 'disk images' of the material given to us on CD and floppy disk. These disk images can be used by forensic tools and can be mounted on computers as if they were the disk in question. Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES ________________________________ From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Forstrom, Michael Sent: 17 November 2009 20:37 To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement For starters, I'd also like to publicly congratulate Susan and her colleagues on the Workbook. I'll respond to Susan's call for "other experiences" with personal archives containing digital materials and move on to discussion relating to arrangement. At the Beinecke Library we've been acquiring manuscript collections with what I've indentified as fugitive digital content (small numbers of disks) for roughly a decade. At Beinecke these disks tend to reside in the papers of writers and in the records of small presses and literary journals and they tend to contain word processing files, such as drafts of writings or letters. We've processed several personal archives containing disks and discovered that, in general, small numbers of disks and files lend themselves to item-level analysis and arrangement by content and larger numbers of disks and files lend themselves to arrangement by format. There are of course other considerations, but these are the two models we've pursued to date. We recently acquired our first real hybrid archive--a writer in mid-career. We made a macro/functional appraisal and a snapshot accession, copying files, incuding email, directly off two working machines in the writer's home. In doing so, I should add, we tested a revised Paradigm records survey and transfer protocol. We may be able to respect the original order in arrangement, though processing will be complicated by the fact that there is duplication between the machines and variations in the directories. Assuming additions to this collection, a preliminary proposal is to leave well enough alone and not integrate the digital and paper components at this time. We need to revisit this, but there is an argument for tackling this now, doing some additional appraisal, testing appraisal tools, in general, doing more so that some of the complexities of the accession, say, context provided through dialogue with the author, isn't lost or difficult to interpret at the point of future processing. So, a couple questions for Susan. First, whether any Paradigm project collections have been fully processed? And second, if you conducted any snapshot accessions as part of the project, what if any additional work was done on them in house. Other comments welcome of course. Best, Michael Forstrom Manuscript Unit Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library New Haven, CT 06520 203.432.7215 From rgscarter at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 13:58:28 2009 From: rgscarter at gmail.com (Rodney Carter) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:58:28 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Original Order for digital records Message-ID: Rick's question about the relevance original order of digital collections last night got me thinking quite a bit. Is it still relevant? If so, how do we express it in our finding aids? While finding the notion of a singular "original order" somewhat problematic given that it only reflects a particular order at a particular time without easily acknowledging how arrangement changes over time, I do believe the concept remains relevant - perhaps more so than ever. Understanding where people store their information, and with what other files, and how these files are used and are moved over time from one storage media and/or device (from floppy disk, to harddrive, to USB, to "the cloud", etc.) will provide the context needed to allow for a richer understanding of the information. The Survey questions ask for exactly this type of information. I wonder, however, how aware people are of their own/their office's filing system. Personally, I frequently have to do a bit of digging to find which of the several email addresses I sent a particular message from or on which harddrive or external HD or USB key I have a particular file saved. Has the prompting through the Survey questions been successful in identifying where donors' records are? [seeing Michael & Susan's last emails which came in as I type it seems this question has been answered - helpful as a starting point but may require follow-up]. The description of the Barbara Castle collection's catalog entry in Susan's email from Tuesday, with multiple "orders" allowed their browser interface is certainly intriguing. It could also be interesting to map the evolution of a digital collection, tracing when & how files were created and moved around, using the technical metadata held within the digital files (I am only assuming this is possible given my rather limited technical understanding of these sorts of things) or through comparing "snapshots" of the disc images you describe. I am thinking or something along the lines of the timelines on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine except for personal fonds instead of webpages. This certainly would acknowledge the fluid nature of the creator's original order(s). To briefly comment on Susan's question to me about the Sisters' personal collections - you are correct, as an "in house" archives, the problem of personal/professional it is less of a concern than it might be in a collecting institution. Individually, the Sisters vary greatly on their record creating/keeping and what gets transferred from the archives ranges from a few items to many boxes. Typically the files are what you would find in most people's personal collections - diaries & journals, correspondence, diplomas, certificates & awards, photographs, art done by the Sisters, also medical records and administrative records. To this date, however, very little has been given digitally. What I do have from the Sisters' personal digital collection is mostly photographs which I have acquired by getting them to allow me to copy the pictures onto a cd or a usb, which I then house on the Archives' computer. While many are computer literate, they still print seemingly everything. And this is the unofficial position of the administration here: if it is important it will be printed. I am not entirely convinced however (there are occasional comments about "never knowing what to keep" and "cleaning out my email/files" which send shivers down my spine & despite telling the Sisters that I am more than happy to help them out with their files I've yet to be asked to assist). I am planning to to try to get copies of files off the Sisters' computers on a regular basis. This will serve as a backup for them with the added benefit of having a scheduled transfer to the archives..or at least that is how I plan to sell it to them. We'll see how that works ... Rodney On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:47 PM, wrote: > > [...] > All of this also makes one think about another aspect -- the relevance of > "original order" in digital collections. > [...] > Regards, > > Rick > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091119/a7e9c171/attachment.html From catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca Fri Nov 20 09:14:59 2009 From: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hobbs, Catherine) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:14:59 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Original Order for digital records References: Message-ID: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BB@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> I too was caught by the new possibilities for exploring and making evident original order in digital archives and also presenting user-oriented orders. Particularly the idea of expressing different orders, evolutions of orders or even parallel evolutions of orders depending on the number of types of uses of digital technology by the creator in combination with his/her various roles. There are many factors at play here that need to be teased when determining arrangement (which have come up earlier in our discussion): how does a choice to use a certain medium or free email service overlap with the creator's own ideas of what they are doing or role they are playing? Which will become the defining factor in the arrangement? I wonder, Sue, if the FutureArch project or further thoughts about the Paradigm project have presented new ways of appraisal or mapping of the creator's overlapping digital worlds in cases where the creator has an extremely complex digital life (using mobile media, traditional email and desktop, and storage of their documents on the web)? Can we think of archival description as including diagrammes of the creators' lifestyle, for example? Secondly, what became of the whole issue of recovering erased files from old hard drives? Have you had creators who have agreed to let these stand as records? I work with some literary archival creators who seem to be open to the possibility of recovering erased files (i.e. they seem to be fairly comfortable with drafts of literary works being recovered, not necessarily correspondence). Have you included issues of recovered files in transfer agreements? The issue of what a creator meant to destroy and whether or not this choice to destroy can or should be reversed raises an ethical delemma if the creator is deceased (would you do this in cases where the creator could not be consulted and the estate was involved?) and new complexities to donor negotiations. Catherine Rick's question about the relevance original order of digital collections last night got me thinking quite a bit. Is it still relevant? If so, how do we express it in our finding aids? While finding the notion of a singular "original order" somewhat problematic given that it only reflects a particular order at a particular time without easily acknowledging how arrangement changes over time, I do believe the concept remains relevant - perhaps more so than ever. Understanding where people store their information, and with what other files, and how these files are used and are moved over time from one storage media and/or device (from floppy disk, to harddrive, to USB, to "the cloud", etc.) will provide the context needed to allow for a richer understanding of the information. The Survey questions ask for exactly this type of information. I wonder, however, how aware people are of their own/their office's filing system. Personally, I frequently have to do a bit of digging to find which of the several email addresses I sent a particular message from or on which harddrive or external HD or USB key I have a particular file saved. Has the prompting through the Survey questions been successful in identifying where donors' records are? [seeing Michael & Susan's last emails which came in as I type it seems this question has been answered - helpful as a starting point but may require follow-up]. The description of the Barbara Castle collection's catalog entry in Susan's email from Tuesday, with multiple "orders" allowed their browser interface is certainly intriguing. It could also be interesting to map the evolution of a digital collection, tracing when & how files were created and moved around, using the technical metadata held within the digital files (I am only assuming this is possible given my rather limited technical understanding of these sorts of things) or through comparing "snapshots" of the disc images you describe. I am thinking or something along the lines of the timelines on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine except for personal fonds instead of webpages. This certainly would acknowledge the fluid nature of the creator's original order(s). To briefly comment on Susan's question to me about the Sisters' personal collections - you are correct, as an "in house" archives, the problem of personal/professional it is less of a concern than it might be in a collecting institution. Individually, the Sisters vary greatly on their record creating/keeping and what gets transferred from the archives ranges from a few items to many boxes. Typically the files are what you would find in most people's personal collections - diaries & journals, correspondence, diplomas, certificates & awards, photographs, art done by the Sisters, also medical records and administrative records. To this date, however, very little has been given digitally. What I do have from the Sisters' personal digital collection is mostly photographs which I have acquired by getting them to allow me to copy the pictures onto a cd or a usb, which I then house on the Archives' computer. While many are computer literate, they still print seemingly everything. And this is the unofficial position of the administration here: if it is important it will be printed. I am not entirely convinced however (there are occasional comments about "never knowing what to keep" and "cleaning out my email/files" which send shivers down my spine & despite telling the Sisters that I am more than happy to help them out with their files I've yet to be asked to assist). I am planning to to try to get copies of files off the Sisters' computers on a regular basis. This will serve as a backup for them with the added benefit of having a scheduled transfer to the archives..or at least that is how I plan to sell it to them. We'll see how that works ... Rodney On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:47 PM, wrote: > > [...] > All of this also makes one think about another aspect -- the relevance of > "original order" in digital collections. > [...] > Regards, > > Rick > > > From susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk Fri Nov 20 11:23:26 2009 From: susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk (Susan E Thomas) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:23:26 -0000 Subject: [Personal_archives] Original Order for digital records In-Reply-To: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BB@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BB@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Message-ID: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB6466397252D@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> > I wonder, Sue, if the FutureArch project or further thoughts > about the Paradigm project have presented new ways of > appraisal or mapping of the creator's overlapping digital > worlds in cases where the creator has an extremely complex > digital life (using mobile media, traditional email and > desktop, and storage of their documents on the web)? In all honesty, the Bodleian has yet to receive an archive that represents quite this degree of complexity. The only mobile device we have in our possession at present is a Psion organiser once used by the department of Western Manuscripts, and we acquired that with a view to experimentation. We've dealt with overlapping stores in terms of different computers, disks, snapshots of material, etc., but we've yet to acquire online materials from real depositors. Forensic analysis tools have been very helpful in appraising the material: we create a 'case' and add all the different components to it (the 'evidence'); we can then use the various filtering, sorting and searching tools available to help us understand what we have. Returning to mobiles for a moment. I'm not sure how easy it will be to acquire mobile devices from depositors. When in use they are so central to everyday life, but when replaced by a new device are they retained or recycled? I suspect it's the latter. We happen to have a fine collection of old PDAs at home, but I'm not sure that's normal! We don't have a fine collection of old mobile phones, but with the convergence of phones and PDAs (and much more besides) maybe we will start to keep them? > Can we think of archival description as including diagrammes of the > creators' lifestyle, for example? Yes, I think so. To do some things would require that we create metadata to tag items/folders/disks (perhaps as representing one or more aspects of the creators' lifestyle); that might not be feasible with the resources we have, but it could be possible if the material can be exposed to user tagging online (unlikely for many personal archives for a while yet). What might be more realistic is to leverage metadata that is more easily obtained, automating keyword extraction to build indexes, maybe using email header information to visually map out correspondence networks - who emails who and how often (for example: http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Viegas/themail/viegas_themail.pdf and http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Viegas/themail/viegas_themail.pdf). > Secondly, what became of the whole issue of recovering erased > files from old hard drives? Have you had creators who have > agreed to let these stand as records? I work with some > literary archival creators who seem to be open to the > possibility of recovering erased files (i.e. they seem to be > fairly comfortable with drafts of literary works being > recovered, not necessarily correspondence). Have you > included issues of recovered files in transfer agreements? > The issue of what a creator meant to destroy and whether or > not this choice to destroy can or should be reversed raises > an ethical delemma if the creator is deceased (would you do > this in cases where the creator could not be consulted and > the estate was involved?) and new complexities to donor negotiations. We have yet to include this kind of issue in terms of agreement. We haven't been working with forensics tools or digital materials long enough to have this all mapped out, but I think we've a much better idea of what we need to discuss with individuals now. It's an issue that's cropped up at other archives and libraries dealing with forensics too. As a result of that common concern, the Library is participating in an investigation of the application of digital forensic techniques to archives, and this study will explore ethical issues as well as others. In the meantime, our approach has been to be careful. We have yet to be tried by 'deleted' material that's particularly contentious, which is helpful. The issue of deceased creators is troubling; I wonder whether the decision might be made based on an evaluation of the material? When it's made available to researchers we can certainly ensure that they know it was previously deleted, allowing them to judge its significance for themselves. Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES > -----Original Message----- > From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu > [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf > Of Hobbs, Catherine > Sent: 20 November 2009 14:15 > To: Rodney Carter; Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Original Order for digital records > > I too was caught by the new possibilities for exploring and > making evident original order in digital archives and also > presenting user-oriented orders. Particularly the idea of > expressing different orders, evolutions of orders or even > parallel evolutions of orders depending on the number of > types of uses of digital technology by the creator in > combination with his/her various roles. There are many > factors at play here that need to be teased when determining > arrangement (which have come up earlier in our discussion): > how does a choice to use a certain medium or free email > service overlap with the creator's own ideas of what they are > doing or role they are playing? Which will become the > defining factor in the arrangement? > > I wonder, Sue, if the FutureArch project or further thoughts > about the Paradigm project have presented new ways of > appraisal or mapping of the creator's overlapping digital > worlds in cases where the creator has an extremely complex > digital life (using mobile media, traditional email and > desktop, and storage of their documents on the web)? Can we > think of archival description as including diagrammes of the > creators' lifestyle, for example? > > Secondly, what became of the whole issue of recovering erased > files from old hard drives? Have you had creators who have > agreed to let these stand as records? I work with some > literary archival creators who seem to be open to the > possibility of recovering erased files (i.e. they seem to be > fairly comfortable with drafts of literary works being > recovered, not necessarily correspondence). Have you > included issues of recovered files in transfer agreements? > The issue of what a creator meant to destroy and whether or > not this choice to destroy can or should be reversed raises > an ethical delemma if the creator is deceased (would you do > this in cases where the creator could not be consulted and > the estate was involved?) and new complexities to donor negotiations. > > Catherine > > > > Rick's question about the relevance original order of digital > collections last night got me thinking quite a bit. Is it > still relevant? If so, how do we express it in our finding aids? > > While finding the notion of a singular "original order" > somewhat problematic given that it only reflects a particular > order at a particular time without easily acknowledging how > arrangement changes over time, I do believe the concept > remains relevant - perhaps more so than ever. Understanding > where people store their information, and with what other > files, and how these files are used and are moved over time > from one storage media and/or device (from floppy disk, to > harddrive, to USB, to "the cloud", etc.) will provide the > context needed to allow for a richer understanding of the information. > > The Survey questions ask for exactly this type of > information. I wonder, however, how aware people are of their > own/their office's filing system. > Personally, I frequently have to do a bit of digging to find > which of the several email addresses I sent a particular > message from or on which harddrive or external HD or USB key > I have a particular file saved. > > Has the prompting through the Survey questions been > successful in identifying where donors' records are? [seeing > Michael & Susan's last emails which came in as I type it > seems this question has been answered - helpful as a starting > point but may require follow-up]. > > The description of the Barbara Castle collection's catalog > entry in Susan's email from Tuesday, with multiple "orders" > allowed their browser interface is certainly intriguing. It > could also be interesting to map the evolution of a digital > collection, tracing when & how files were created and moved > around, using the technical metadata held within the digital > files (I am only assuming this is possible given my rather > limited technical understanding of these sorts of things) or > through comparing "snapshots" of the disc images you > describe. I am thinking or something along the lines of the > timelines on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine except > for personal fonds instead of webpages. This certainly would > acknowledge the fluid nature of the creator's original order(s). > > > To briefly comment on Susan's question to me about the > Sisters' personal collections - you are correct, as an "in > house" archives, the problem of personal/professional it is > less of a concern than it might be in a collecting > institution. Individually, the Sisters vary greatly on their > record creating/keeping and what gets transferred from the > archives ranges from a few items to many boxes. Typically the > files are what you would find in most people's personal > collections - diaries & journals, correspondence, diplomas, > certificates & awards, photographs, art done by the Sisters, > also medical records and administrative records. To this > date, however, very little has been given digitally. What I > do have from the Sisters' personal digital collection is > mostly photographs which I have acquired by getting them to > allow me to copy the pictures onto a cd or a usb, which I > then house on the Archives' computer. While many are computer > literate, they still print seemingly everything. And this is > the unofficial position of the administration here: if it is > important it will be printed. I am not entirely convinced > however (there are occasional comments about "never knowing > what to keep" and "cleaning out my email/files" which send > shivers down my spine & despite telling the Sisters that I am > more than happy to help them out with their files I've yet to > be asked to assist). I am planning to to try to get copies of > files off the Sisters' computers on a regular basis. This > will serve as a backup for them with the added benefit of > having a scheduled transfer to the archives..or at least that > is how I plan to sell it to them. We'll see how that works ... > > Rodney > > On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:47 PM, wrote: > > > > > [...] > > All of this also makes one think about another aspect -- > the relevance > > of "original order" in digital collections. > > [...] > > Regards, > > > > Rick > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Personal_archives mailing list > Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives > From catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca Fri Nov 20 14:10:20 2009 From: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hobbs, Catherine) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:10:20 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: Heartfelt thanks to Sue References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BB@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB6466397252D@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Message-ID: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BC@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Well, it occurs to me that Sue may be heading home for the weekend if she hasn't gone already. (Not to discourage any late Friday comments from Canada or the U.S., but...) I would like to take this opportunity to thank Sue for being such an interactive guest on the personal archives listserv. We've benefitted a great deal from hearing your particular experiences in developing the Paradigm project and pursuing the test cases. This experience has helped us hone in on the particular approaches we need to push our own projects forward in terms of digital and hybrid archives and this is thanks to your very specific comments in answer to all of our questions. Thank you too to those of you who shared dilemmas (email scanned back into digital indeed!) and approaches they've refined for their own particular situations or experiences. This dialogue has certainly been a success. Warm thanks to all for your enthusiasm. Catherine P.S. it's officially over but there is nothing to discourage you from making further comments or carrying any one of these topics forward on the listserv. As always, we're all ears! -----Original Message----- From: Susan E Thomas [mailto:susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk] Sent: Fri 11/20/2009 11:23 AM To: Hobbs, Catherine; Rodney Carter; Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Original Order for digital records > I wonder, Sue, if the FutureArch project or further thoughts > about the Paradigm project have presented new ways of > appraisal or mapping of the creator's overlapping digital > worlds in cases where the creator has an extremely complex > digital life (using mobile media, traditional email and > desktop, and storage of their documents on the web)? In all honesty, the Bodleian has yet to receive an archive that represents quite this degree of complexity. The only mobile device we have in our possession at present is a Psion organiser once used by the department of Western Manuscripts, and we acquired that with a view to experimentation. We've dealt with overlapping stores in terms of different computers, disks, snapshots of material, etc., but we've yet to acquire online materials from real depositors. Forensic analysis tools have been very helpful in appraising the material: we create a 'case' and add all the different components to it (the 'evidence'); we can then use the various filtering, sorting and searching tools available to help us understand what we have. Returning to mobiles for a moment. I'm not sure how easy it will be to acquire mobile devices from depositors. When in use they are so central to everyday life, but when replaced by a new device are they retained or recycled? I suspect it's the latter. We happen to have a fine collection of old PDAs at home, but I'm not sure that's normal! We don't have a fine collection of old mobile phones, but with the convergence of phones and PDAs (and much more besides) maybe we will start to keep them? > Can we think of archival description as including diagrammes of the > creators' lifestyle, for example? Yes, I think so. To do some things would require that we create metadata to tag items/folders/disks (perhaps as representing one or more aspects of the creators' lifestyle); that might not be feasible with the resources we have, but it could be possible if the material can be exposed to user tagging online (unlikely for many personal archives for a while yet). What might be more realistic is to leverage metadata that is more easily obtained, automating keyword extraction to build indexes, maybe using email header information to visually map out correspondence networks - who emails who and how often (for example: http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Viegas/themail/viegas_themail.pdf and http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Viegas/themail/viegas_themail.pdf). > Secondly, what became of the whole issue of recovering erased > files from old hard drives? Have you had creators who have > agreed to let these stand as records? I work with some > literary archival creators who seem to be open to the > possibility of recovering erased files (i.e. they seem to be > fairly comfortable with drafts of literary works being > recovered, not necessarily correspondence). Have you > included issues of recovered files in transfer agreements? > The issue of what a creator meant to destroy and whether or > not this choice to destroy can or should be reversed raises > an ethical delemma if the creator is deceased (would you do > this in cases where the creator could not be consulted and > the estate was involved?) and new complexities to donor negotiations. We have yet to include this kind of issue in terms of agreement. We haven't been working with forensics tools or digital materials long enough to have this all mapped out, but I think we've a much better idea of what we need to discuss with individuals now. It's an issue that's cropped up at other archives and libraries dealing with forensics too. As a result of that common concern, the Library is participating in an investigation of the application of digital forensic techniques to archives, and this study will explore ethical issues as well as others. In the meantime, our approach has been to be careful. We have yet to be tried by 'deleted' material that's particularly contentious, which is helpful. The issue of deceased creators is troubling; I wonder whether the decision might be made based on an evaluation of the material? When it's made available to researchers we can certainly ensure that they know it was previously deleted, allowing them to judge its significance for themselves. Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES > -----Original Message----- > From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu > [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf > Of Hobbs, Catherine > Sent: 20 November 2009 14:15 > To: Rodney Carter; Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Original Order for digital records > > I too was caught by the new possibilities for exploring and > making evident original order in digital archives and also > presenting user-oriented orders. Particularly the idea of > expressing different orders, evolutions of orders or even > parallel evolutions of orders depending on the number of > types of uses of digital technology by the creator in > combination with his/her various roles. There are many > factors at play here that need to be teased when determining > arrangement (which have come up earlier in our discussion): > how does a choice to use a certain medium or free email > service overlap with the creator's own ideas of what they are > doing or role they are playing? Which will become the > defining factor in the arrangement? > > I wonder, Sue, if the FutureArch project or further thoughts > about the Paradigm project have presented new ways of > appraisal or mapping of the creator's overlapping digital > worlds in cases where the creator has an extremely complex > digital life (using mobile media, traditional email and > desktop, and storage of their documents on the web)? Can we > think of archival description as including diagrammes of the > creators' lifestyle, for example? > > Secondly, what became of the whole issue of recovering erased > files from old hard drives? Have you had creators who have > agreed to let these stand as records? I work with some > literary archival creators who seem to be open to the > possibility of recovering erased files (i.e. they seem to be > fairly comfortable with drafts of literary works being > recovered, not necessarily correspondence). Have you > included issues of recovered files in transfer agreements? > The issue of what a creator meant to destroy and whether or > not this choice to destroy can or should be reversed raises > an ethical delemma if the creator is deceased (would you do > this in cases where the creator could not be consulted and > the estate was involved?) and new complexities to donor negotiations. > > Catherine > > > > Rick's question about the relevance original order of digital > collections last night got me thinking quite a bit. Is it > still relevant? If so, how do we express it in our finding aids? > > While finding the notion of a singular "original order" > somewhat problematic given that it only reflects a particular > order at a particular time without easily acknowledging how > arrangement changes over time, I do believe the concept > remains relevant - perhaps more so than ever. Understanding > where people store their information, and with what other > files, and how these files are used and are moved over time > from one storage media and/or device (from floppy disk, to > harddrive, to USB, to "the cloud", etc.) will provide the > context needed to allow for a richer understanding of the information. > > The Survey questions ask for exactly this type of > information. I wonder, however, how aware people are of their > own/their office's filing system. > Personally, I frequently have to do a bit of digging to find > which of the several email addresses I sent a particular > message from or on which harddrive or external HD or USB key > I have a particular file saved. > > Has the prompting through the Survey questions been > successful in identifying where donors' records are? [seeing > Michael & Susan's last emails which came in as I type it > seems this question has been answered - helpful as a starting > point but may require follow-up]. > > The description of the Barbara Castle collection's catalog > entry in Susan's email from Tuesday, with multiple "orders" > allowed their browser interface is certainly intriguing. It > could also be interesting to map the evolution of a digital > collection, tracing when & how files were created and moved > around, using the technical metadata held within the digital > files (I am only assuming this is possible given my rather > limited technical understanding of these sorts of things) or > through comparing "snapshots" of the disc images you > describe. I am thinking or something along the lines of the > timelines on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine except > for personal fonds instead of webpages. This certainly would > acknowledge the fluid nature of the creator's original order(s). > > > To briefly comment on Susan's question to me about the > Sisters' personal collections - you are correct, as an "in > house" archives, the problem of personal/professional it is > less of a concern than it might be in a collecting > institution. Individually, the Sisters vary greatly on their > record creating/keeping and what gets transferred from the > archives ranges from a few items to many boxes. Typically the > files are what you would find in most people's personal > collections - diaries & journals, correspondence, diplomas, > certificates & awards, photographs, art done by the Sisters, > also medical records and administrative records. To this > date, however, very little has been given digitally. What I > do have from the Sisters' personal digital collection is > mostly photographs which I have acquired by getting them to > allow me to copy the pictures onto a cd or a usb, which I > then house on the Archives' computer. While many are computer > literate, they still print seemingly everything. And this is > the unofficial position of the administration here: if it is > important it will be printed. I am not entirely convinced > however (there are occasional comments about "never knowing > what to keep" and "cleaning out my email/files" which send > shivers down my spine & despite telling the Sisters that I am > more than happy to help them out with their files I've yet to > be asked to assist). I am planning to to try to get copies of > files off the Sisters' computers on a regular basis. This > will serve as a backup for them with the added benefit of > having a scheduled transfer to the archives..or at least that > is how I plan to sell it to them. We'll see how that works ... > > Rodney > > On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:47 PM, wrote: > > > > > [...] > > All of this also makes one think about another aspect -- > the relevance > > of "original order" in digital collections. > > [...] > > Regards, > > > > Rick > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Personal_archives mailing list > Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives > From Robert.Fisher at lac-bac.gc.ca Fri Nov 20 14:29:41 2009 From: Robert.Fisher at lac-bac.gc.ca (Fisher, Robert) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:29:41 -0500 Subject: [Personal_archives] Original Order for digital records In-Reply-To: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BB@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BB@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Message-ID: <5A19101AD086BC498E3DFFEDD643E6827FADE5@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> I have been lurking, reading the posts, and enjoying the discussion all week. Now that it's officially over I have found the time to weigh in on a few points raised. I find the challenge to original order interesting because it really hits at a key tenet of archival theory. I had never considered before the possibility of tracing changes to the arrangement through time. Is the last original order the "official" order? In the analog world we thought that way. When the archives acquired the personal papers, at that time the original order was fixed, theoretically at least. It's also possible in the digital universe to find things in more than one place. If a file is found in multiple folders on a hard drive, to what series does it belong? To all three? What of generous use of links and shortcuts so that one document can be accessed from multiple folders? Archival theory will have to adapt to more flexible concepts of original order and arrangement. >From the paradigm article, I was struck that the challenges of digital personal archiving fit into two types: 1. Challenges of donor/ creator interaction, i.e. the need for timely intervention, donor resistance 2. Preservation challenges, technical considerations, formats and migration issues The second category looms large right now because many big institutions are trying to figure it out. These challenges are not just common to personal archives but to all archives and digital libraries. It seems to me that many of questions will be tackled first by our colleagues in government records whose challenges seem exponentially bigger and more immediate than ours on the private side. We may be able to ride on their coat-tails as they begin to define best practices. Smaller archives may be able to use their solutions. The first challenge is what will be most particular to personal archives. Paradigm's challenges in dealing with politicians seemed to represent what everyone in personal archives eventually will face. I was struck by the number of times Susan mentioned in the article that politicians were concerned about transferring sensitive records, the difficulty in persuading politicians to give more personal material, concerns about others' personal information in digital form, and concerns about negative leaks. Reading between the lines one wonders how good a record was actually received from these donors? It appears that timely intervention too has potential drawbacks. And here the shortage of resources will be the big challenge to most archives. At least with politicians (and probably writers and artists) it is often possible to identify early on in their careers who are the most significant creators and establish these relationships. With most of the creators in the broad acquisition spectrum, this question of significance is not so clear as early (as mentioned in the article), and often the archival resources devoted to these fields are less. Archivists acquiring in these have-not fields will have to depend on the fortuitous survival of digital archives, which ultimately will privilege those creators who are the most attuned to the preservation of their own archives, those who take the steps during their lifetimes and careers to transfer, migrate, and preserve over time their most significant digital files. Individual awareness will be the key to long term preservation. Thanks to Susan and SISPA for organizing this very interesting discussion! Cheers, Rob _______________________________________ Robert C. Fisher Archiviste, Archives sociales / Archivist, Social Archives Biblioth?que et Archives Canada / Library and Archives Canada 550 boulevard de la Cit?, Gatineau, QC, Canada K1A 0N4 Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada www.collectionscanada.gc.ca _______________________________________ The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Library and Archives Canada. -----Original Message----- From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hobbs, Catherine Sent: November 20, 2009 9:15 AM To: Rodney Carter; Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Original Order for digital records I too was caught by the new possibilities for exploring and making evident original order in digital archives and also presenting user-oriented orders. Particularly the idea of expressing different orders, evolutions of orders or even parallel evolutions of orders depending on the number of types of uses of digital technology by the creator in combination with his/her various roles. There are many factors at play here that need to be teased when determining arrangement (which have come up earlier in our discussion): how does a choice to use a certain medium or free email service overlap with the creator's own ideas of what they are doing or role they are playing? Which will become the defining factor in the arrangement? I wonder, Sue, if the FutureArch project or further thoughts about the Paradigm project have presented new ways of appraisal or mapping of the creator's overlapping digital worlds in cases where the creator has an extremely complex digital life (using mobile media, traditional email and desktop, and storage of their documents on the web)? Can we think of archival description as including diagrammes of the creators' lifestyle, for example? Secondly, what became of the whole issue of recovering erased files from old hard drives? Have you had creators who have agreed to let these stand as records? I work with some literary archival creators who seem to be open to the possibility of recovering erased files (i.e. they seem to be fairly comfortable with drafts of literary works being recovered, not necessarily correspondence). Have you included issues of recovered files in transfer agreements? The issue of what a creator meant to destroy and whether or not this choice to destroy can or should be reversed raises an ethical delemma if the creator is deceased (would you do this in cases where the creator could not be consulted and the estate was involved?) and new complexities to donor negotiations. Catherine Rick's question about the relevance original order of digital collections last night got me thinking quite a bit. Is it still relevant? If so, how do we express it in our finding aids? While finding the notion of a singular "original order" somewhat problematic given that it only reflects a particular order at a particular time without easily acknowledging how arrangement changes over time, I do believe the concept remains relevant - perhaps more so than ever. Understanding where people store their information, and with what other files, and how these files are used and are moved over time from one storage media and/or device (from floppy disk, to harddrive, to USB, to "the cloud", etc.) will provide the context needed to allow for a richer understanding of the information. The Survey questions ask for exactly this type of information. I wonder, however, how aware people are of their own/their office's filing system. Personally, I frequently have to do a bit of digging to find which of the several email addresses I sent a particular message from or on which harddrive or external HD or USB key I have a particular file saved. Has the prompting through the Survey questions been successful in identifying where donors' records are? [seeing Michael & Susan's last emails which came in as I type it seems this question has been answered - helpful as a starting point but may require follow-up]. The description of the Barbara Castle collection's catalog entry in Susan's email from Tuesday, with multiple "orders" allowed their browser interface is certainly intriguing. It could also be interesting to map the evolution of a digital collection, tracing when & how files were created and moved around, using the technical metadata held within the digital files (I am only assuming this is possible given my rather limited technical understanding of these sorts of things) or through comparing "snapshots" of the disc images you describe. I am thinking or something along the lines of the timelines on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine except for personal fonds instead of webpages. This certainly would acknowledge the fluid nature of the creator's original order(s). To briefly comment on Susan's question to me about the Sisters' personal collections - you are correct, as an "in house" archives, the problem of personal/professional it is less of a concern than it might be in a collecting institution. Individually, the Sisters vary greatly on their record creating/keeping and what gets transferred from the archives ranges from a few items to many boxes. Typically the files are what you would find in most people's personal collections - diaries & journals, correspondence, diplomas, certificates & awards, photographs, art done by the Sisters, also medical records and administrative records. To this date, however, very little has been given digitally. What I do have from the Sisters' personal digital collection is mostly photographs which I have acquired by getting them to allow me to copy the pictures onto a cd or a usb, which I then house on the Archives' computer. While many are computer literate, they still print seemingly everything. And this is the unofficial position of the administration here: if it is important it will be printed. I am not entirely convinced however (there are occasional comments about "never knowing what to keep" and "cleaning out my email/files" which send shivers down my spine & despite telling the Sisters that I am more than happy to help them out with their files I've yet to be asked to assist). I am planning to to try to get copies of files off the Sisters' computers on a regular basis. This will serve as a backup for them with the added benefit of having a scheduled transfer to the archives..or at least that is how I plan to sell it to them. We'll see how that works ... Rodney On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:47 PM, wrote: > > [...] > All of this also makes one think about another aspect -- the relevance > of "original order" in digital collections. > [...] > Regards, > > Rick > > > _______________________________________________ Personal_archives mailing list Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives From RICKBARRY at aol.com Fri Nov 20 14:41:48 2009 From: RICKBARRY at aol.com (RICKBARRY at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:41:48 EST Subject: [Personal_archives] Fwd: National Coalition for History Update November 20, 2009 Message-ID: Thanks to Susan for an excellent exchange and to Caroline for setting it up. I thought that Susan and others who may have an interest in political archives might find interesting 2 of today's National Coalition of History (NCH - _http://historycoalition.org/_ (http://historycoalition.org/) ) newsletter, especially the first one below dealing with records such as those of interest to Sue & Co. This is FYI, only. Anyone who has questions can contact me off-list. Regards, Rick ____________________________________ From: newsletter at historycoalition.org To: RICKBARRY at AOL.COM Sent: 11/20/2009 1:07:02 P.M. Eastern Standard Time Subj: National Coalition for History Update November 20, 2009 _Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress Meeting_ (http://historycoalition.org/2009/11/20/advisory-committee-on-the-records-of-congress-meeting/) November 20, 2009 On November 16, the _Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress (ACRC)_ (http://www.archives.gov/legislative/cla/advisory-committee/) met at the National Archives. The Advisory Committee is comprised of the officials in Congress responsible for its records (Clerk of the House, Secretary of the Senate, Senate Historian, and House Historian) and the Archivist of the United States, who is responsible for the administration of the archived records of Congress. _Read the full article ?_ (http://historycoalition.org/2009/11/20/advisory-committee-on-the-records-of-congress-meeting/) _National Archives Announces Plans to Test Haldeman Watergate Notes_ (http://historycoalition.org/2009/11/20/nara-announces-plans-to-test-haldeman-watergate-notes/) .... November 20, 2009 The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has announced that it is convening a forensic document examination team to study two pages of the handwritten notes of H. R. Haldeman, a chief of staff to President Richard M. Nixon, 1969-1973. The two pages of notes under investigation were purported to have been created during Mr. Haldeman's 11:30 A.M. meeting with President Nixon on June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. _Read the full article ?_ (http://historycoalition.org/2009/11/20/nara-announces-plans-to-test-haldeman-waterga te-notes/) .... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20091120/60e5f9f3/attachment-0001.html From susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk Mon Nov 23 06:43:45 2009 From: susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk (Susan E Thomas) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:43:45 -0000 Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: Heartfelt thanks to Sue In-Reply-To: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BC@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> References: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C9756920117D9BC@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int> Message-ID: <2B62B6A5971C004D866763A60EB64663972603@OULS-EXCH01.ouls.ox.ac.uk> Dear all, Thanks for a good week of discussion! Look forward to the next one. Best, Susan Susan Thomas Digital Archivist/Project Manager Bodleian Library Web: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283821 Post: Oxford University Library Services Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES > -----Original Message----- > From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu > [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf > Of Hobbs, Catherine > Sent: 20 November 2009 19:10 > To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu > Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: Heartfelt thanks to Sue > > Well, it occurs to me that Sue may be heading home for the > weekend if she hasn't gone already. (Not to discourage any > late Friday comments from Canada or the U.S., but...) I would > like to take this opportunity to thank Sue for being such an > interactive guest on the personal archives listserv. We've > benefitted a great deal from hearing your particular > experiences in developing the Paradigm project and pursuing > the test cases. This experience has helped us hone in on the > particular approaches we need to push our own projects > forward in terms of digital and hybrid archives and this is > thanks to your very specific comments in answer to all of our > questions. Thank you too to those of you who shared dilemmas > (email scanned back into digital indeed!) and approaches > they've refined for their own particular situations or experiences. > > This dialogue has certainly been a success. > Warm thanks to all for your enthusiasm. > Catherine > > P.S. it's officially over but there is nothing to discourage > you from making further comments or carrying any one of these > topics forward on the listserv. As always, we're all ears! >