Preserving Digital Archives











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10 Responses to “Preserving Digital Archives”

  1. Eleanor Shevlin Says:

    Many thanks, Anna, for this excellent report on the “Beyond the Text” conference held at Yale. I look forward to hearing from others who attended.

    Did any of the papers or ensuing discussions address the before-and-after effects of digitization on deciding what to preserve? In other words, how is the decision-making process of what to include being altered by digitization? Do the choices focus on what to digitize and what not? Or does what is “tossed” literally mean discarded permanently rather than simply not digitized?

    Let me also mention an upcoming event that should contribute to this conversation, One of the pre-conference events at the SHARP 2013 conference this July seems quite relevant. The roundtable session, Digitization Crossroads, is being organized by Dr. Alea Henle, University of Wisconsin-Madison, as part of SHARP’s outreach to the the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and related professionals. The session aims “to bring together scholars and practitioners from archives, history, library science, and literary studies to encourage interdisciplinary and cross-profession exchanges.” As the roundtable description explains, professional and disciplinary interests frequently result in different approaches to collecting and preserving materials. These differences, in turn, assume key importance in creating an archive, for a designer’s perspective on collection and preservation will influence his or her choices in constructing the archive and thus ultimately the shape and functionality of the archive itself.

    Speakers include:

    • Alea Henle, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Chair
    • Mark A. Greene, University of Wyoming
    • Melissa Homestead, University of Nebraska
    • A. Mitchell Fraas, University of Pennsylvania
    • Kristine Hanna, Internet Archive
    • August Imholz, Jr., Readex (retired)


  2. Anna Battigelli Says:

    Thanks, Eleanor, for calling attention to the SHARP Digitization Crossroads roundtable, which sounds like it will provide a productive multiplicity of perspectives on archival issues.

    To answer your question, the before-and-after effects of digitization were an undercurrent in many of the sessions. The Agrippa Files story suggests that the tossed is not always permanently tossed.

    But the general question of how to select remained problematic, despite vague claims to be “true to the author.”

    Missing was a sense of what it means to be true, not to an author, but to a work. If literary archives are, as David Sutton noted, unique because of the insight they provide to the creative process, loyalty to a work–and to the thought directed at that work–seems key. Here too, the Agrippa Files project seems relevant. No one seemed to care that the author intended for the electronic poem to disappear. But they did care about preserving the poem.


    • Eleanor Shevlin Says:

      Thanks, Anna. This need to be true to the work, too, also serves as an important reminder that the work is a product of many hands. This multiplicity should receive consideration as well.

      My before-and-after query is tied to issues of tossing. One hears about material being discarded after it has been digitized, and I wonder if roughly the same amount of material was being “tossed” pre-digital preservation. Or was it instead just receiving very low priority in terms of being catalogued.


      • Anna Battigelli Says:

        The discussion was mostly of archiving digital records, though Catherine Hobbs talked about the variety of media confronting archivists as they bring order to personal archives. One example she provided was Carol Shields’ mother’s diary, a physical book that is part of Shields’ archive and holds significance because Shields includes a diary very much like it in Stone Diaries.

        You are right about the need to consider collaborative authorship. Heather MacNeil addressed the need to use nuanced understandings of authorship in her paleontological account of archive creation.


      • Eleanor Shevlin Says:

        I do wonder the effects of digitization on non-textual materials that are sometimes included in archives. Steve Enniss (Folger Shakespeare Library, soon-to-be director of the Harry Ransom Center) gave a fascinating talk a few years ago to the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies. He discussed various types of objects–I believe, locks of hair, cigars, and the like were examples he used–that were included along with the texts (not surprisingly, these objects often became subject to fetishization).


  3. Alea Says:

    Sounds like a fascinating conference. I wish I could have been there–but this wrap-up is a start!

    As it happens, the matter of discarding materials after they’ve been digitized (and the related matter of whether digitizing books involves disbinding them or digitizing while intact) is an example of why I’m vested in increasing dialogue across disciplines and professions about digitization. From a material standpoint, each copy potentially offers unique information. From a library and/or archival viewpoint, a digitized copies plus a few physical ones may be sufficient to justify de-accessioning copies or not accessioning additional ones. There is no one right answer (to invoke a librarian mantra).

    Two of the terms in archival literature which I’d like to bring into wider discussion are transparency and provenance. Transparency involves allowing users of archives, databases, and digital and other resources, as much information as practical about their mediation. Provenance has been gaining traction (of sorts) in book history particularly with respect to physical books. I’m not particularly fond of the term primarily because it is usually interpreted in a singular manner as the history of ownership of an item. My personal research is on the ways individuals collecting material for the writing of history (centered on the U.S. before the Civil War) affected what was collected and preserved. Based on that, I think it is important to consider multiple, overlapping histories of sources as items but also as representatives of various types of sources.


  4. Eleanor Shevlin Says:

    Thanks so much, Alea, for your remarks. Transparency is crucial, and the concept seems to inform the roundtable you have organized for SHARP. Are you promoting a more expansive definition of “provenance”? A meaning that would extend far beyond simple ownership to include motivations and methods?


  5. Alea Says:

    I’ve been using “source histories” as an alternative to provenance. Should I get my wish to see the matter receive wider attention & discussion, I’m not sure how much influence I’ll have in determining terminology! Perhaps provenance may be defined more expansively. And yes, I’d like to see meanings going beyond simple ownership of specific items to consider motivations and methods of specific items–and of the specific items as representative or not of broader categories of items.

    All too often, we don’t have much provenance information for a variety of reasons (sometimes it’s not that the info doesn’t exist, but that it exists in library or archives institutional records unconnected to the actual item). Yet, if we consider items as specific sources and as members of a variety of categories — creator(s) (gender, race, status, age, influence . . .), topic, genre, form, owner(s), means of transfer of ownership, and so on — we can develop more complex histories or provenance. I’m working on providing an example of this in one of my works-in-progress.


  6. Eleanor Shevlin Says:

    Your notion of “source histories” seems extremely useful. I can readily see the value in charting the “means of transfer of ownership” for book historians.


  7. Anna Battigelli Says:

    Alea: This issue received attention at the conference from both Catherine Hobbs and Heather MacNeil.

    The term they used was “fonds.” Their perspective was that a given fonds’ history was shaped, not just by the original collector, but also by archivists and, more generally, by cultural forces. Michael O’Driscoll added the perspective that institutions also shape collections.


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