[Personal_archives] dialogue on arrangement and digital personal archives

[Hobbs, Catherine]

Let's start!  Personal Archives in New Guises: Arrangement Issues within Digital Complexities (SISPA dialogue:  4 April-18 April, 2012.)
Good morning,
Welcome to the SISPA dialogue on arrangement and digital personal archives. I hope you've had a chance to look at the suggested readings and reflect on your experiences with digital records.  Even if you haven't, I hope you won't hold back in the conversation.
One of the reasons this topic interests me so much (you'll figure that out from my presentation) is that there seems to be a gap between what we some of us doing to document contexts of creation (such as creating site photographs and taking copious notes about original orders) and the treatment of digital records when they come in.  The emphasis on the technical side of digital records seems to have avoided issues of integrating them with a holistic approach to archival fonds and understanding their proper contexts, to my mind.
So, I would be very happy to hear about any concepts from the readings or from your working practice that you've found useful when approaching arrangement issues for digital records in personal fonds.
Do you think the questionnaire for donors in Sarah Kim's thesis proposal is useful?  Would you expand it in any other ways?
How do you think order and arrangement issues play out in personal archives?  Do you see personal archives as becoming more set apart from organizational records in the digital realm because of contexts of creation and lifestyles?
What did you take away from the video by Peter Chan of Stanford's use of FTK to process born-digital records?  How does such an approach fit or not fit with arrangement and context in digital personal archives?
Please feel free to jump in with any other tangents that interest you concerning arrangement and related concepts in the digital realm.  These are by way of a starter...
Catherine

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