[Personal_archives] Guidance for creators

[Donald Force]

This is quite the interesting discussion and I'm glad it was recently
brought to my attention. If I may add a few thoughts (and I apologize for
the length, I sort of got carried away)....

 

Heather, you raise an excellent point with the problem of trying to "know
where the borders and boundaries of the fonds ... lies." I tend to agree
with Cathy that information is not necessary lost, that is, deleted or
irretrievable, as it is simply forgotten - the wonders of "benign neglect."
Sure, computers crash and internet service providers go under, but for the
most part, the information survives. This presents archivists with two very
serious problems.

 

First, as has been pointed out, there is the question of identifying all the
fragmented/decentralized parts of a person's fonds. While I do not want to
dwell on this issue, I think it should be mentioned that even if archivists
are able to figure out where a person has stored his/her information, access
becomes a rather big issue. We can know that a person had Hotmail, Yahoo!,
and Gmail e-mail accounts, but can we access those messages once the
archives is to obtain them (legally, ethically, professionally)? On a
slightly similar note, this also raises the question of using IP addresses
to track a person's information. Assuming that archivists have had little or
no communication with the donor, how is an archivist to know the IP address
when all he/she receives is a laptop (or two or three) and a box full of
external hard drives, memory sticks, and CDs? Unless I am mistaken, the IP
address is specific to the internet provider and how are archivists to know
this information let alone be able to use it- especially if that IP address
is recycled once the service is terminated?

 

To me, there is a bigger issue than tracking down the bits, bytes, and
pieces  (sorry, couldn't help myself) of a person's fonds. The second issue
that archivists must confront is our growing use and dependence of Web 2.0
applications. The problem may not be identifying what information a person
has where but deciphering one person's fonds from another person's fonds.
Neil Beagrie wrote in 1999 that because of the growth of digital
information, a "public persona" was emerging, a persona blurring the
boundaries between the private, public, and work environments ("Plenty of
Room at the Bottom?" D-Lib). The more I think about this phrase, the more I
wonder how much of a reality it is becoming, and, more importantly, how much
of a problem it is for archivists. Even if we are able to crawl the internet
for all the information a person has created, how much of this information
is also linked to someone else's personal information? A blog post, a wiki
entry, Twitter feeds, and my arch-nemesis of time consumption, Facebook with
all its wall postings, photographs, links, status updates, and comments from
friends. As archivists, we constantly emphasize that context is everything,
but isn't it the context which enables these sites to flourish and be
understood?

 

In the "good old days," we could, with a fair number of exceptions, have a
single letter, read it, and still be able to pull something away from it
because, chances are, it had a certain amount of content to it. We did not
necessarily have to have the date, author, and other contextual information.
Would it be nice and give us a more complete picture of the purpose behind
the letter or manuscript? Of course, but the letter was still useful by
itself. I can recall countless times where I read fragments of World War I
letters and was still able to pull something away from them - even though it
may have only been at the very general level.

 

Today, it seems to me that the amount of content has significantly decreased
(in part, I would argue, a result of the text messaging phenomenon) making
us more reliant upon that contextual information to understand the meaning
of what is being said - contextual information that has become inherently
linked with other people's fonds. A good example being that if I visit a
friend's Facebook page and he/she has a wall "conversation" with a friend
whom I do not know, then I only see one side of that conversation and
chances are there is not enough text there for me to make heads or tails
about what is being said or discussed. At best, I'm only getting half the
story. Furthermore, what is a blog post without the blog or responses to the
posting? What is a Twitter feed with only one or two twits (if that is
indeed the singular term)? If we are to crawl and identify these singular
pieces of information for a person's fonds what good are they because we
have removed them from their context? In other words, the archival bond, the
relationship a record has with other records, is no longer being solely
created by an individual and his/her own personal records, the bond is being
formed because of other people's information. Thus, it begs to ask the
question, if we are to crawl for a person's fonds, where does the crawl stop
so we may get the "whole of the documents"?

 

Hopefully this will add some fuel to the discussion because it is definitely
one that needs more attention.

 

Cheers,

Donald Force

Ph.D. Student & InterPARES 3 GRA

School of Library, Archives, and Information Studies

University of British Columbia

 

 

 

From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu
[mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of
home at queensu.ca
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 8:54 AM
To: Hobbs, Catherine
Cc: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Guidance for creators

 

I whole-heartedly agree with Rod's comments about context and decentralized
storage of the digital belongings. The research value of where the material
lives, and how it lives in that environment, is of great importance to us as
archivists and also to future researchers. That said, I also understand the
fear of decentralized storage leading to loss and fragmentary glimpses in
the future, because once it is decentralized, as archivists, how are we to
know where the borders and boundaries of the fonds, or the whole (of what
remains), lies. 

 

My technical question is slightly different than Rodney's and maybe
incorporates centralized and decentralized notions. What I wonder is if it
is possible to have a centralized map of an individual's path and
interaction with their own digital belongings and other electronic
information. Cathy, I know you have written about encountered information in
other articles, but is it possible to include in that idea a person's
encounter with their "own" information? I don't see the centralized map as
containing the information, but reflecting the how, when, where of a
person's interaction with material - which ultimately may assist with
appraisal and selection. Sort of a cross between Mac's Time Machine and a
browser history on speed! Is there anything out there that does this sort of
thing - is there a way we could./should be doing some of this type of thing
when we are talking with (living) donors?

 

Heather

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: winmail.dat
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 10482 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20090430/f44bfffa/attachment.bin