Reading Reflection Week 8 – Paper to Pixels

Electronic record keeping is a challenge on many levels, especially for Universities. Now that information that may need to be archived takes so many forms, it first poses a definition challenge, then a cataloging challenge and finally a storage and retrieval challenge. Florence Olsen’s article was written in 1999. Ironically, it coincides with the first time I had a meeting with the UW libraries digital image specialists to discuss the problem of saving and archiving the digital images we use to document events, changing buildings, the seasons on campus and all manner of other ways that photographs are being used. There is also the problem of what to do with three decades of negatives and contact sheets that represent the pre-digital images of events and people on campus. We started a process then that is ongoing and now beginning to address video content that takes much more storage space than still images.

Since then, rules have been written and disseminated, new media for long term storage have been invented and distributed, and people have been trained in the metadata schemes needed to catalog and retrieve the digital content they seek.

But, I think this article is as much about the “why” of archiving as it is the “what” of archiving. Should Universities, and any other entity for that matter, keep their records primarily as a litigation defense? Or is there value in the “institutional memory” that has historical significance to scholars or individuals who are trying to understand the world decades later? I chose to write about the penny press in the 1840s for my research paper. Without historians able look through the archives of letters, newspapers, and photographs of the day held in libraries my paper would have been pretty dry. It is the personal anecdotes from a letter and the context one gains from a street scene caught by a photographer that bring history to life. We need to preserve that for future generations.

And here is something else to consider – do all of the archives need to be held by the original publisher? Yohai Benkler talks about the Open Archives Initiative in Wealth of Networks. The OAI is basically archiving on the Web with a refined set of meta data tags that would allow anyone who archives material using the OAI protocol to search quickly and accurately for the material later. His contention is that by using peer-to-peer processes like this, “archiving by single points of reference would be unnecessary”. (325)

Olsen, F. (1999)
Archvists Struggle to Preserve Crucial Records as Paper Gives Way to Pixels; Chronicle of Higher Education October 15, 1999