I blogged about the assigned websites last year and you can read that post as wellby clicking here.
This week I would like to expand on what I wrote last year by looking at a few different elements of those websites that I didn’t discuss last time around. First, there is a growing trend among digital archives to stop at just the digitization step and either ignore or purposely not curate the content that is being collected. This is becoming more and more common as individuals and institutions often underestimate the costs of setting up such a digital archive (and thus seldom have any money left to do any curatorial or analyzation of their own) or they believe that is not part of their purpose. These archives, like “real” archives are there to facilitate analysis by others. Although I agree that the accessibility to scholars and other interested parties is paramount, we might be missing a chance to rethink how an archivist interacts with scholars and the larger public. Perhaps the archivist could authenticate the donated item. Or the digital archivist could offer a way to provide contextual information to the “raw” data that is being collected. It seems that we have simply transferred the analog format onto the digital without looking at how it might be different this time around.
I do, however, want to raise an issue that I also raised last year and hope we can discuss in our seminar. How do we control for authenticity with such crowd-sourced digital archives? Does it matter if we know or don’t know the social, political, economic background of those who contributed to the digital archives? What might be the pros and cons of being able to contribute anonymously? Does the trend toward digital archives (and self-submission) mean that we no longer want to preserve analog sources? Don’t people still often take notes on paper, doodle, draw, or leave behind other artifacts? Are digital archives only good for digitaly produced items (digital photographs and electronic texts)? What would a hybrid archive look like in say 10 years time?
We should also discuss the concept of the “digital generation” and how the new generation might want to preserve their childhood now so they have access to it in the future.