INLS 525: Managing Electronic Records

Week 5 (2/12)

It is not the onset of amnesia that accounts for present difficulties but a more complete recall than any prior generation has ever experienced. Steady recovery, not obliteration, accumulation, rather than loss, have led to the present impasse.

— Eisenstein (1979)

Gleick

As a duplicating machine ... its real power was to make [texts] stable... Print was trustworthy, reliable, and permanent.

...

All forms of knowledge achieved stability and permanence, not because paper was more durable than papyrus but simply because there were many copies. (pg. 400)

IDC

[O]ur digital universe is replete with bits of data that exist but for a moment — enough time for our eyes or ears to ingest the information before the bits evaporate into a nonexistent digital dump.

"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com

IDC's Digital Universe Study, sponsored by EMC, June 2011

IDC's Digital Universe Study, sponsored by EMC, June 2011

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. (pg. 410)

One may lose the ability to impose order on the chaos of sensations. The truth seems harder to find amid the multitude of plausible fictions. (pg. 403)

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1. InfoEthics
2. Authenticity, Forensics & Emulation
3. Enhanced Curatorship
4. Training & Guidelines
5. iCuration
6. Collaboration & Integration
7. Participation & Advanced Cataloguing
8. From Lifetracking to Personalised Usability
9. Archival PIM & Archives in the Wild
10. Adaptive Curation & Management
11. Evolutionary dynamics & complex networks
12. Advocacy

• How do we define "manuscript" materials?
• What is the difference between Personal Digital Archiving & Manuscript Materials?

"It's basically like giving someone the keys to your house,"
— Kirschenbaum

1. Garnering selections of personal archives
2. Providing enhanced security and access for the most culturally and scientifically valuable personal archives
3. Guardians of the authenticity of the originals including digital objects in the wild
4. Providing services that strengthen and assist the effectiveness of archives in the wild
5. Developing an expertise in the content of archives in the wild as well as the repositories own holdings.

• What are the challenges?
• What are the opportunities?

IDC

• Journey to the Cloud
• Big Value from Big Data
• Trust in the Digital Universe (Privacy only, Compliance driven, Custodial, confidential, lockdown.)

Tech

• New tools for creating metadata
• Virtualization
• Move to the Cloud (it's inevitable)
• Big Data projects w/ bang & new data strategies
• Up-to-date security
• Advanced storage management tools

Managment

• Stragegy for shared resources -> virtualization -> cloud
• Analytical and managerial skill sets + mindsets for big data
• Data-driven organization
• Press suppliers and partners to help

Challenges

• Huge volumes of electronic information are being created
• Electronic records are complex
• Identification and classification of electronic records are difficult in a decentralized computing environment.

Automation will not solve the problem of lack of priority, which is of long standing.

• What are the simularities between Business & Government records?
• What are the differences?
• What are the challenges?
• What are the opportunities?

• Who is responsible for it?
• The article specifically addresses the relationship between social change and social media. Where else can we find records that "document humanity"?