[Personal_archives] dialogue on arrangement and digital personal archives

[Heather Home]

Hello everyone,

Thinking about "the digital" has made me harken back to our previous 
readings about arrangement and think about the "series according to 
record/physical type" that was being promoted in the PAC manual in the 
'70's. I think that donors themselves seem to do that with some of their 
digital objects in mixed media fonds. How often are all of their videos 
physically stored together, or you get the old disk box of floppies, or 
all of their photographs are in a photo drawer, or on one drive. I would 
say that this is changing rapidly, but has reflected the way in which 
the creators have seen this material - as different from the other 
material but unified through its difference. That said, I have 
integrated digital or various media objects into multiple series 
descriptions (despite them all being handed to me in a box, despite 
multiple "series" being on one diskette) and I have also left it as a 
separate media-dependent series, it all depends on how strong or weak I 
see the bonds of interrelation.

I'm also struck by the statement in Sarah Kim's article (not her 
statement but a quote from a study) that “in our analog past, the 
default was to discard rather than preserve; today the default is to 
retain”. While I am sure this is proven in quantitative ways, 
personally, in talking with donors about their digital habits with 
regard to email in particular, but also with versions and drafts of 
documents as well, the digital gets tossed or written over more 
frequently in their digital life than it ever did in their analog life. 
Maybe more dross is retained but not necessarily more meat. I also get 
the feeling from donors that whereas in the analog world their culling 
of their records may have been purposeful and thoughtful, in the digital 
realm it is haphazard and reactionary (things start slowing down, 
something can't be saved without freeing up some space etc...). I am 
intrigued by the promotion of the personal digital archiving day as a 
way of getting people to think about their digital lives and 
documents.http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/padKit/index.html 
.

that's my two cents for now.
Heather

-- 
Heather Home, B.A., M.A.S.
Public Services/Private Records Archivist
Queen's University Archives, Kathleen Ryan Hall
Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7L 3N6
t: 613.533.6000 x74456
f: 613.533.6403

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