[Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for Susan

[Hobbs, Catherine]

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 littéraires de langue anglaise Documentary Heritage Collection Sector / Secteur de la collection du patrimoine documentaire Library and Archives Canada / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada Place de la Cité, Room / Piece 598, 550, boul. de la Cité, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4 catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca Téléphone /Telephone 819-934-8331 Télécopieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333

Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada www.collectionscanada.gc.ca


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