[Personal_archives] dialogue on arrangement and digital personal archives

[Rodney Carter]

Hello everyone.
Thanks, Catherine, for organizing this discussion and for kicking
things off with your series of questions.

I thought the questionnaire created by Sarah Kim to be a very
interesting and a potentially extremely useful tool. It can go a long
way to identify the types of documents created, the devices used, and
the locations they are stored.

It also makes the user think deeply about their records - asking which
documents are important or meaningful - which many people might not
tend to do.

If I were to adopt this sort of tool, I might add more questions
asking about what documents are not being kept - asking how the
individual goes about weeding their files, if they just store
everything or are systematic about deleting; if they pay attention to
file formats becoming outdated and how active they are in ensuring
their documents are viable; and what they do when they update their
computers (transfer everything, are selective, start over fresh
completely - it has become easier to transfer documents now that
external harddrives are popular but even in the recent past this
wasn't the case). This could shed additional context for what remains.

One question that I found quite interesting was the last - "What does
digital "archiving" mean to you". I think this can shed light on
people's approach to their files and can forewarn archivists to
potential issues. Are things placed on optical discs or usb drives and
left? Is there active intervention, with check sums and frequent
migration?

It is difficult to generalize, but I think about how things like
Gmail's "archive" feature which, when applied to messages, seemingly
makes them dissapear. There is no "archive" folder where they can be
found. [It took me quite some time to figure out that 'archived'
messages are organized under the "All Mail" heading"]  How do people
use this and other backup/archiving tools?

In terms of archival arrangement, I think employing a questionnaire
like this would be extremely useful in showing the interrelation of
documents in, what I believe would be often non-hierarchical ways, and
provide a starting point for mapping their arrangement(s).

Rodney

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Hobbs, Catherine
<Catherine.Hobbs at bac-lac.gc.ca> wrote:
> 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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