[Personal_archives] Guidance for creators

[Rodney Carter]

[note: Cathy's reply to Yvette came in after I started writing this response
so some of what follows echoes what is said in the reply. I decided to
finish the email, hopefully picking up on, and not just repeating, some of
what Cathy wrote]

As much as I agree with Yvette that de-centralized storage makes the
archivists life less easy (when is life ever easy? and my apologies if I am
taking liberties with what you meant, Yvette) I would suggest that the very
fact that people choose to put a file in one location rather than another is
very significant.

Just as three photographs printed from the same negative have different
meaning when placed in a shoebox, placed in a scrapbook and framed and hung
on an art gallery walls, a digital photograph that is printed and placed in
a shoebox, placed on flickr, used as an avatar on lavalife, appearing on my
wall in facebook, showing up as my desktop image on my home computer,
modified in photoshop and used in my christmas cards, etc. etc. all have
different meanings. Or, even if we only consider storage possibilities, and
not even entertain the diffuse uses, the files that are selected as worthy
of being stored online, of being emailed to oneself, or being copied to
cd/dvd/usb drive are being selected as worthy of some special consideration.
[this reflects the social choices Cathy describes]

The use affects the record's meaning, that intrinsic metadata, which, after
more thought on what that might entail, could really be the archival bread &
butter: the context of the digital object as it is moved, copied, modified
and used in a seemingly endless array of possibilities. It is not just the
bits & bytes that reflect the person's life but how they are used in the
world.

More than not creating the one right tool (for storage) there are too many
"right tools" for so many different jobs and it would be limiting to look
solely at a singular digital artifact, placed on a centralized space without
any sense of its history.

At the end of the ACA session at last year's conference I mentioned that I
thought the Library & Archives should, as the only institution empowered to
do so under the current legislation, crawl the internet for content created
by Canadians. I envision them capturing not a limited sample but ALL content
stemming from a Canadian IP address, including blogs, youtube videos, photos
on flickr, etc. as well as saving business, personal and institutional
websites. With my limited technical understanding, I see no reason why this
wouldn't be currently feasible. Of course, there are a multitude of moral
rights which would have to be dealt with in this scenario, but in terms of
capturing Canadian's records creation, we theoretically have the capability
to document the Canadian experience at an unprecedented scale. And, if the
LAC does not act, the potential of losing it all is very real.

Perhaps this is fanciful, impossible, or just plain undesirable but it could
be one way of dealing with the issues of the dispersal of data across the
online environment - capture the cloud regularly and get a sense of its
shape, what it is made up of, how it shifts, and how it evolves.

Rodney

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Hackett, Yvette <
yvette.hackett at lac-bac.gc.ca> wrote:

>  Hi everybody,
>
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