From catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca  Mon Oct 26 10:15:51 2009
From: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca (Hobbs, Catherine)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:15:51 -0400
Subject: [Personal_archives] SISPA dialogue with Susan Thomas and beyond
Message-ID: <436DC86C6808BD45844156D41C975692010AF489@srv-pdlc-exch3.lac-bac.int>

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