[Personal_archives] dialogue on arrangement and digital personal archives

[Hobbs, Catherine]

Please don't be shy about sharing your views.  I'm sure everyone understands that experience with digital personal archives is more limited (and there are far fewer certainties) than with more traditional archival documents.
If you have thoughts relating to email or word documents and photographs that make you re-evaluate the fonds as a whole and its interrelationships, well that's a good place to start.  Even in the cases where the majority of the fonds is "analogue" and you have several diskettes to process, you may have had questions about arrangement that would be worth sharing with your colleagues.
For example, does the fact that the diskette is a physical carrier mean that you have kept the diskette as a logical grouping in the arrangement?  I found a compelling reason to do this when a certain diskette was taken by an author to France with her for a year abroad.  The diskette seemed to be acting as we normally understand the file to act in traditional physical archives.  For now, we can leave aside more complex questions of multiple devices and platforms for those people living digital lives.
Just a thought to spur discussion....

From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hobbs, Catherine
Sent: April-04-12 8:26 AM
To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Personal_archives] dialogue on arrangement and digital personal archives

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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