One man typing...

happy holidays!

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:04:00 +0000

I hope everyone looking at this is warm, safe and with friends or family (or, indeed, perfectly content in their own company!). Have a brilliant holiday season and 'all the best' for 2012.

festive fifteen 2011 (or why I like Andy Ihnatko)

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:53:00 +0000

One of my favourite technology writers is a chap called Andy Ihnatko. As well as writing for the Chicago Sun Times and having a regular column in Macworld magazine, he has, over the past five or six years, become one of my favourite technology broadcasters too, largely due to his appearances on the TWiT podcast network.

The launch of Andy's own podcast, the Ihnatko Almanac on the 5by5 network, was clearly something to be celebrated (at least by me). Listening to Andy break out of his 'normal' subject matter and range across various cultural topics alongside his co-host Dan Benjamin has been, and remains, a really enjoyable way to pass some of the time on my commute this past dozen or so weeks. That's not to say that they don't address technological issues; they just do so in a different (and arguably more interesting) context than a simple discussion of tech for its own sake.

As a recordkeeper it was episode 10 that caught my attention. Andy and Dan used Michael Palin's published diaries as a jumping off point to discuss journaling and, without using the terms that an archivist or records manager would have used, ranged across issues of memory, community, digital preservation/obsolescence, appraisal, value, narrative and so on. If you do work in recordkeeping it's well worth a listen as it's one of those times where you think 'we haven't got all the answers, but we're trying to get there…' (or put another way, it reminds you that looking after record memory and keeping it accessible matters).

All of the above is by way of a very long-winded introduction to the fact that Andy is in the process of unveiling his annual musical Advent Calendar on his blog, and so am I (sort of)! With a doff of my cap to Andy and the late, incomparable, John Peel, I'm in the process of listing my 'Festive Fifteen' on twitter. This is a bit of annual self-indulgence where I flatter myself that someone out there might be at all bothered to find out the names of 15 songs that I've enjoyed listening to this year (not necessarily released this year either). Follow me @Al30 if you're in any way curious. Follow Andy at @Ihnatko.

optical illusion

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 07:38:00 +0000

As a quick follow-up to my post yesterday, this line from an article on Ars Technica by Chris Foresman caught my eye:

Apple has drawn the line in the sand: optical discs are out, and digital distribution is the future

who needs a floppy optical drive anyway?

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:37:00 +0000

The launch of a desktop Mac without an optical drive yesterday (the new Mac mini) put me in mind of the launch of the original iMac in the late 1990s and the paradigm shift in computing which that machine signaled. Back then, Apple were the first to identify that the floppy disk was obsolete; slow, unreliable and lacking the capacity needed for contemporary computing. The iMac was designed from the outset for networked environments and the internet. The rhetorical question Apple asked was 'why would you need a floppy drive if you have email?'.

So here we are in 2011 with the strongest signal to date that optical media is becoming (in computing terms at least) moribund (if not quite dead). Software and data are distributed via networks or the cloud and on those increasingly rare occasions where you have no network connection, portable flash storage is cheap and ubiquitous. There's a simple test if you're worried about the lack of an optical drive - ask yourself if you can remember the last time you burned a data disk?

But there's the rub - if you downloaded OSX Lion last night and followed the advice of lots of tech websites then the last time you burned a data disk may well have been yesterday (see, for example, this article on Lifehacker). Apple distributed the new version of their brilliant OS over the air via the Mac App Store with no way to keep a physical copy as insurance against technical failure. The good and the great of tech journalism all recommended that you make a bootable copy of the installer on DVD or flash drive to give you just that insurance.

And what about those of us still wedded to having physical copies of our media (the 'retromaniacs' to paraphrase Simon Reynolds)? Where does this leave us? I know all about this one - I'm the guy who still buys CDs and boxed-set reissues, then rips them to iTunes so I can take them on the road. I'm the fringe case who likes having CDs for high-quality audio in the house and an iPod Classic so I can take a huge chunk of my music with me wherever I am. (Incidentally, we're the people who want the big capacity iPod to stay in the product line as the rest of the current range has nowhere near enough storage for us). For the retromaniacs like me (and, I presume, for the film buffs who love all the DVD/Blu-ray extras and demand the best HD reproduction on their home theatre systems, but would like to rip the odd film to watch on their iPads) the lack of an optical drive as standard is a big deal.

Then there's the recordkeeping issues to consider. It's not that long ago that high-quality optical media was being recommended as a good 'vault' for digital information and lots of organisations will have neatly arranged rows of CDs and DVDs within their collections. Similarly, I wonder whether we're now approaching a situation where we have to keep an optical drive around which can be plugged into a more modern machine to resurrect the only known copy of some important file, in the same way as we've had to keep floppy drives around for the same reason for some years now? In essence, I'm asking whether Apple's decision to ship a desktop computer without an optical drive points to impending obsolescence in the same way that the iMac's lack of a floppy drive did 13 years ago?

Apple are, in all likelihood, a little ahead of the curve here. Although the first iMac shipped in 1998 it arguably took until the mid-2000s before the rest of the IT industry caught up and stopped putting floppy drives in their PCs as a standard part. However, Moore's Law and the exponential pace of development in technology suggest that if the Mac mini is a portent of the death of plastic discs as viable choices for storage, we'll be writing the epitaph soon; optical media is unlikely to be with us as a mainstream option for too much longer.

consistency improves discovery

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:42:00 +0000

I was struck by a comment made by Jeff Jarvis on the last This Week in Google. He made passing reference to a wish that social networks would implement hashtags in the same way and allow them to be searchable across services and platforms. His remark speaks to a simple truth; that consistency improves discovery. It really is that straightforward.

a slow blogging life...

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 11:15:00 +0000

I'm aware that I've rather neglected this blog recently. My efforts have been directed towards helping to keep the blog at our office up to date and looking good. You can see that at www.archives-records-artefacts.com. I'll leave this blog up for those times where there's something I want to write that isn't a good fit anywhere else, but if you want to keep up with my colleagues or I then the URL above is the best place to go for now.

Not everything works out...

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:23:00 +0000

I'm just back from the FARMER (Forum for Archives and Records Management Education and Research) conference in Oxford where I gave a paper on social tagging as it relates to recordkeeping. One of the things I stumbled upon when I was looking for examples to illustrate the paper was this video:

It didn't make it into the paper (it was a little too general for what I needed), but I did like the timely reminder that not every overhyped technology or gadget breaks through into the mainstream despite the temporary buzz about them in the Web 2.0 echo chamber.

a bit more on online privacy

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sat, 01 May 2010 09:23:00 +0000

Following on from the previous post, there's a great article on lifehacker about privacy on facebook.

get off of my cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 16:31:00 +0000

If you're at all interested in online privacy issues it's worth taking the time to listen to the latest episode of This Week in Google. The show has a really good discussion of the dangers of third-party aggregation of information.

gone but not forgotten

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:10:00 +0000

Things have been a bit quiet here of late, but there will be posts when I've something to say. Meantime, here's some of the more interesting links I've bookmarked with delicious lately (most recent first):

http://bit.ly/cHI17r

http://bit.ly/dkKs8v

http://bit.ly/97JRZC

http://bit.ly/8YBWNM

http://bit.ly/6kDr1x

http://bit.ly/7xIrQz

http://bit.ly/1VhwUb

crowd-sourcing

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:01:00 +0000

I'm re-posting a section of the most recent post from our office blog here in the hope that a few more people might see it and get involved.

One of things we have begun to develop is a link library of online materials relevant to CAIS’ students. Using a small sub-group of our tutors and the delicious social bookmarking site we have established a process that we think can ultimately create a rich resource. You can see the small number of links we've added so far as we've been refining our ideas at delicious.com/CAIS_Archives.

Clearly this resource won’t just be of use to our students. We’re hoping to develop something that contains links which should be of interest or relevance to any archivist, records manager or other information professional. To that end, we would like to invite contributions from anyone in the record keeping community who uses delicious and is interested in helping build the link library and making it as worthwhile as possible.

All we’re asking is that whenever you save a bookmark on a record keeping or related subject with your own delicious account (which is free) you tag it 'for:CAIS_Archives' (without the inverted commas). That sends the bookmark to our inbox and we can then save it for inclusion in the main list. The reason we've used this approach is so that we can keep a modicum of control over the vocabulary we use for tagging. As the list of links grows the tags will become crucial for discovery. However, we will take into consideration any tags you have already attached to the link.

You can read the full post here.

Wave hello?

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:43:00 +0000

Like everyone else and their auntie (including my friend and colleague Steve and many of the archivists and records managers on twitter) I'm interested to see what the potential of Google Wave might be for record keepers. I don't have an invite, but as a result of some long drives this week I've caught up with several podcasts and listened to a lot of people discussing the way that Wave seems to work at this early stage and the prospects for the Wave environment. The best single source I've found so far was this podcast on the TWiT network which, if you're interested, is well worth a listen.

Like most online systems, Wave will evolve based on the choices and actions of its users. However, right now I'm interested in Wave's potential as a collaborative environment where the metadata generated by changes and the conversation about those changes is explicitly linked to the object of the collaboration. That object could be a web page, a document or anything else that a group of people can work on together in an online environment. Wave seems to have the potential to be an environment that moves us beyond sending multiple emails with the thing we're working on attached. Wave could be the environment that moves collaboration beyond the current mess of comments in email, track changes in documents and multiple iterations of the same thing with ever so slightly different filenames and no indication of which copy is 'definitive' (there's an old post of mine on this issue here). Another way to conceptualise Wave at a more basic level, and this was the very helpful example given on the podcast I link to above, was as a focussed, real time Wiki where the conversation and changes aren't buried, but are seen alongside the object.

Admittedly there are lots of collaborative environments and ways of working other than sending emails, but it's the final point in the paragraph above that I think makes Wave so exciting and have so much potential importance; 'the conversation and changes aren't buried, but are seen alongside the object'. Google seems to have created the first collaborative environment where context, conversation and object are captured together and can be rendered together as the record of any collaboration. Context is not managed separately from content. Tantalisingly for record keepers, Wave could be an environment where we can capture everything of consequence in a single output. Yes, some outputs will always need to be separated from notes about their development in certain contexts in the same way as, for example, final versions of reports are produced with all changes accepted or rejected before publication. However, if the record keeper wishes to capture process as well as product for whatever reason, Wave seems to be an environment that could facilitate that capture in a coherent way.

Another thing that interests me about the Wave environment is that, when used in the way described above, the focus of any collaboration or conversation is the object or shared goal of those involved. I wonder if this could almost be characterised as a refresh of the document metaphor for online working? Until I see the system I'm not sue of the answer to that question, but given the prospective focus on the 'thing' at the centre of any collaboration I think there may be some interesting discussions to be had in this regard.

The potential for Wave appears to be vast and it is easy to be excited by the next new thing. However, there will be problems with using Wave and Robert Scoble has rehearsed some of those in a couple of posts on his blog. I won't spend time going over this ground again, suffice to say that I recommend reading what he has to say as a useful counterpoint to many of the positive comments on Wave being made at the moment. From a record keeping perspective it's also worth noting that Wave appears to use a new file format which has been developed by Google for this system. Having thought about the potential for record keepers, there's an obvious issue there too.

The big disclaimer for all of the above is that I haven't yet used the system myself. Having said that, there's so much discussion of Wave at the moment I thought it might be useful to set down some thoughts about what it could mean for record keeping. I'm looking forward to finding out what we can do with Wave.

total archives

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:00:00 +0000

We've had the concept of total archives for some time now, but I heard about two collections this week that illustrate beautifully the idea of trying to capture the recorded memory of 'all segments of a community'. Firstly, there was the story about a grant to improve access and encourage user contributions to the Grateful Dead Archive and then came the news that the archive of the Flat Earth Society is looking for a new home.

Somehow the world seems like a better place when you know that not only do these collections exist, but that they are being looked after by archivists.

a digital life

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:21:00 +0000

Anyone who followed our office blog last week will have noticed that we were hosting our bi-annual Study School, which is a week where the new intake of distance learning students come to Dundee and we introduce them to our VLE, to some of the ideas they will encounter during their studies, to each other and to us and some of the other CAIS tutors.

One of the sessions that got the biggest response this year was on the fragility of digital information and how the rapid pace of change creates incredible challenges for record keepers. There's a post about the session here and Chris, who helped lead the session with Philip Lord, Susan Thomas and I, posted his impression of the afternoon here.

Susan and Philip used a variety of old media to emphasise the points around rapid change and obsolescence and the students were presented with a Fortran program on punched paper tape, disks of various sizes and vintages (3", 3.5", 5.25" etc), a variety of usb keys, minidisks, backup tapes and compact cassettes. (Those of you old enough to remember the C64, Amstrad CPC and Sinclair Spectrum will nod approvingly and remember that those humble C60s and C90s could, and did, contain digital information).

The discussion prompted me to think about the variety of different platforms and operating systems I've used at various stages, as opposed to the media on which the information is stored. With the help of Wikipedia I've come up with the following list and, to be honest, given myself a bit of a shock. Admittedly, some of this dates back to my school days and I don't have digital information from all of these systems lying around, but my experience does illustrate how far we've come, how quickly and the multitude of computer platforms that record keepers may have to cope with.

General

Amstrad CPC 464
BBC B
Acorn Archimedes running RISC OS

PCs

MS DOS 5 and 6
Windows 2
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows NT
Windows XP
Windows Server

Macs

(For the purposes of this post I'm interested in the generations of the OS rather than the machines)

OS 9
OS 10.3 'Panther'
OS 10.4 'Tiger'
OS 10.5 'Leopard'
OS 10.6 'Snow Leopard'

I may have forgotten some of the iterations of the different operating systems and I'm not including platforms I have used belonging to friends and family (but that would expand the list with mentions of C64s, Atari STs, Amigas, a ~~MMX~~ MSX, and PCs running OS/2). What strikes me is that I am by no means a power user, yet I have used at least fifteen platforms fairly regularly at various times.

Whilst many of the platforms noted above are backwards-compatible (to a point) and can read data from their earlier iterations, that backwards-compatibility is not infinite and the capacity to read information created on older systems is dropped periodically. Similarly, each new version of platform brings changes. Some are obvious, like Apple's recent move Snow Leopard dropping support for Power PC hardware, but some are more subtle. This article from Ars Technica examines the way that Apple's move to Snow Leopard changes the way that the system controls the metadata that governs application binding.

The point of all this? That every change compounds the problems faced by record keepers in attempting to ensure that our digital memory is not lost. Arguably, this has become and remains greatest challenge faced by our profession.

Oh, and I didn't mention the different iterations of the software running on all these different platforms.

EDIT: I meant MSX, not MMX (which was an instuction set on a Pentium processor). I also forgot the Acorn Electron and the Amstrad PCW. Gordon Laing's Digital Retro is a great source for this stuff and something I should have looked at before writing the original post!

SoA conference '09

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:01:00 +0000

The following is an extract from a recent post on our deparmental blog. I'm reproducing it here as a handy note of where you can find information on the conference of the Society of Archivists (SoA) this year. You can read the full post here. I'd like to emphasise the reuqest that those at the conference tag their posts and tweets to make the event easier to follow online for those of us who aren't in Bristol.

The SoA have made an effort this year to make information about the conference available online. The conference blog is available here and the official conference twitter feed is available here or by following @SoAConference09 from your own twitter account. [My colleagues] Pat and Caroline, like many other delegates, will also be using twitter to share their thoughts as the conference progresses via our twitter account, @CAIS_Archives. The agreed hashtag for the conference is '#soa09'. You can use twitter search to look for that, or there's an account that's been set up on twapperkeeper to store all the tweets with that tag. We would like to encourage anyone attending or commenting on the conference to use 'soa09' as a tag for blog posts too so that information about, and responses to, the event can be aggregated later.

digitally ethical

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:48:00 +0000

A conversation with our visiting colleague Chris last week and some of the post I wrote on the ever moving goalposts of the digital environment reminded me of some issues raised at a conference I attended earlier this year.

In April I was lucky enough to visit the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill for the DigCcurr 2009 conference. One of the sessions that set me thinking at the time and that has stayed with me since was on the forensic reconstruction of digital data. In a question and answer session following the papers a lively debate took place about whether the fact that we can recover information means that we should? Those arguing that we should recover information where possible suggested that it behoves us to do so as it may help uncover malfeasance of some kind or identify information has been destroyed inappropriately. These are compelling arguments, but worried me enough to ask the following questions in the session:

Can we reconcile our notions of appraisal with the ability to keep everything and, moreover, to recover that which was presumed destroyed? We have all had chance finds in our careers and 'rescued' documents (covered in goodness knows what) from attics and basements, but I imagine very few of us have been charged with going through the confetti from a shredder and reconstructing hard copy records that have been destroyed.

Does all destroyed information meet the test of being a record anyway? Again, appraisal and context will be fundamental to the answer to that question. Just because we can keep something, should we?

Is it our decision to bring back records from the dead? If malfeasance is suspected and a court orders the reconstruction of data then we should absolutely use all the professional skills we have to capture and ensure the integrity of that record. However, should we be the ones making that decision? Are we custodians or are we participants (calling to mind some of the work of Verne Harris)?

I find these issues interesting as they represent another area where the digital sphere throws many of the tenets of our profession into sharp relief. In essence, the question to which I keep returning is whether our understanding of our professional ethical frameworks is sophisticated enough to cope with the demands of the digital age?

context is king (slight return)

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:42:00 +0000

Merlin Mann speaking on this week's MacBreak Weekly:

'Data, by itself, is not very useful.

Data in context with other data...that's where it gets valuable.'

Amen.

ever moving goalposts...

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:38:00 +0000

One of the recurring themes of this blog since I started writing it has been the fragmented and transitory nature of many of the services we use online. Last autumn a well-linked meme did the rounds about the death of the blog as people moved to various microblogging platforms (principally twitter). Many people, myself included, commented on that at the time.*

It would appear that particular meme has run its course and we're now to hail the resurgence of blogging. It's discussed on TWiT this week and Shel Israel, amongst others, has provided some perspective on this trend.

To be frank, I'm not sure that blogging ever went away, but that's a conversation for another time. What this debate illustrates, once again, is the way that people flit between services and the way that any trace often breaks when they do. My colleague Caroline, in a post on our departmental blog, asked whether 'blogs [will] appear in the archives 100 years from now?'. The context for that question was a reflection on the 'accidental' inclusions that are often found in collections of personal papers. The question that keeps recurring in my mind is whether we are going to have the ability to recognise personal 'collections' at all? The disparate nature of online services and a potential inability to reconstruct the way that any one person chose to use those services is likely to severely impact upon our ability to reconstruct the electronic analogue to a collection of personal papers. I'm not attempting to suggest that we should keep everything, nor am I suggesting that professional notions of appraisal should be dismissed. However, I do think that there is something of an irony in that we're at a point that technology gives us the opportunity to attempt to capture much more information, but that the fragmented nature of the information and the services holding it makes that process particularly complex.

The 'elephant in the post' is that I haven't mentioned the issue of technological obsolescence at all and the way that compounds this problem. I think I'll leave that to Robert Scoble. His recent post about the death of Tr.im makes the point rather well.

*For another example of contemporary comment see Euan's post here.

ever decreasing niches...

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:21:00 +0000

Emailing a friend and colleague this evening about the way we use online services I was struck by how fragmented our access to information is becoming. I think it could be entirely possible to only access services and viewpoints that chime with your own and never move outwith them. In an age when our access to information and different views is almost infinite I wonder if that isn't rather a shame.

Thinking about this also raises issues of context and ways to extract the signal from the noise that are highly pertinent to the work of information professionals. Do we 'manage the crowd' (cf Steve) and try to make sense of things that way, or should we continue to take the more traditional line of applying our professional tools and explaining to people why what we're doing is helpful?

not blogging (again!)

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:32:00 +0000

The observant amongst you will have noted a distinct lack of activity here (and indeed on my twitter feed) for a while now. There are lots of very good reasons for this, but none of them are interesting enough for this blog. However, the advent of our new departmental blog at work has given me a good excuse to get back to writing posts. Anyone interested in the work of archivists, records managers and museum curators (and indeed archival and records management educators) may wish to stop off here from time to time.

context is king - privacy isn't dead

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:07:00 +0000

Really interesting episode of TWiT this week:

'there is wisdom in the crowd,

but you have to set the context'

and

'is privacy dead?

No...at least I hope not.'

All this in the first part of the show. It's well worth a listen.

EDIT: I should have mentioned that Don Tapscott is one of the guests on the show.

lies, damn lies and statistics

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:16:00 +0000

Just over a year ago I added Google Analytics to this blog in an attempt to get a sense of who, if anyone, was stopping off to read the thoughts of a record keeper. I'm not going to analyse the figures below in any way, other than to say I imagine they are a lot smaller than some of the more popular record keeping blogs (ArchivesNext, Records Management Futurewatch, Records Junkie, the Digital Archive etc). This might be due, in part, to the sporadic way I post.

I'm posting these figures just in case anyone is trying to get a feel for the popularity and reach of record keeping blogs. I hope they're useful and I'd encourage others to do the same. It would be interesting to develop a sense of the size of the online readership for archival and records management issues.

11 MARCH '08 - 27 MARCH '09

VISITS

• 3,194 Visits
• 1,824 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 5,412 Pageviews

TOP FIVE COUNTRIES (visits)

• 1,991 United Kingdom
• 846 United States (with at least one visit from 40 of the 50 States. California, Minnesota and Texas have sent the most visitors)
• 105 Canada
• 55 Australia
• 21 Netherlands

TRAFFIC SOURCES

• Search and direct traffic was the most common source of visits (1,746)
• Of referring sites, other record keeping blogs sent the bulk of the remaining visitors with ArchivesNext, Records Junkie, Records Management Futurewatch and the Archives Blogs aggregation site topping the list. (Tip of the hat here to Kate, Russell, Steve and Mark).

BROWSERS AND OS

• 41.36% Firefox
• 37.51% IE
• 9.89% Safari

• 80.18% Windows
• 17.38% Mac

Despite the high number of Windows users I found the preference for Firefox interesting.

CONTENT

The most popular posts were:

• two point oh dear ii
• 'two point zero', 'two point o' or 'two point oh dear'?
• web 2.0 for archivists

The popularity of these posts is mirrored in a noticeable spike in traffic when the debate about archives/RM 2.0 was being held across several blogs, including this one, last autumn.

recent conferences

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 11:53:00 +0000

Reports on the JISC RM conference and the Archives Hub's Archives 2.0 conference have been posted recently:

JISC conference

Archives 2.0

They are worth looking into if you missed the conferences.

digital lives

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:25:00 +0000

I attended some of the digital lives conference at the British Library this week and have been reflecting on some of what I heard.

It's not a new thought but the proliferation of the digital services and devices we use is staggering. Just thinking of my own use over the last nine years or so gave me pause:

2000-2003 I had an email account and access to the internet a work and a mobile phone, but that was about it. I was still using a walkman to listen to music when I travelled and the only real digital things in the house were my CD player and my old PC (which didn't even have a modem).

2003-2006 Digital photos and music. Broadband at home. Started posting to the odd online discussion. I was reading blogs but didn't tend to comment on them. At work we began teaching our distance learning courses in archives and records management fully online using the University's VLE.

2006-2009 In terms of hardware I use much the same as I did in the proceeding three years (it's just things have become a bit fancier (smartphone rather than a standard mobile, faster Mac etc)). The real change has been the amount of things I do online. I suspect I'm typical in that I was very much a passive consumer of the web in previous years (browsing and online shopping), but since 2006 I've started writing this blog, I'm on twitter, I was on bebo for a while but have switched to facebook (you go where your friends are!), I use Skype etc. The whole web as a platform metaphor has become something very important to the way I communicate both at home and at work.

What struck me when thinking about this is how quickly parts of my life have become digital and how normal that seems. We don't tend to take the long view with technology, but the changes really are remarkable. Similarly I was struck by how much more obvious, clear and easily identifiable my trace has become. We really are leaving parts of ourselves everywhere and I''ve blogged in the past about some of the concerns that raises.

That digital trace is what many of the sessions at the conference were about. What are the ways to identify and capture digital lives for posterity? The legal and ethical implications of that process were also discussed throughout the days I was there. However, what struck me was the self-conscious nature of our digital trace. I write this blog knowing (hoping!) that others will read it. Similarly I use facebook to share things with friends and twitter to communicate in a way that I know is basically public. There is a process of self selection that goes along with all of that which is different to writing a letter or penning a private diary. In a world where vast digital storage means that we can potentially keep everything, does the self-conscious nature of online activity change the way that we approach appraisal or the questions that we have to ask during that process? When private archives are more than a few bundles of letters should we be more selective and more knowing about the self-conscious nature of what we are examining?

Another recurring theme of the conference was that of aggregation (and the difficulties caused by EULAs). If we ignore the legal issues for a moment, it was suggested that because we live our digital lives via a number of disparate and largely unconnected systems then some aggregation is likely to be necessary to represent the digital life of one person. What I'm not clear about is how that changes our notions of the importance of context. How do we preserve the context of something from facebook when it is stripped from its place as part of a social activity and placed alongside a blog post? Similarly, if a photograph is taken from a computer and forms part of a digital collection is something lost where that same photo is ignored in an online environment (because it is a duplicate), but where the context provided by that environment is different (the picture is part of an album with a different name, there are tags attached etc)? Is that re-contextualisation important and if so how do we decide that? Should we be trying to preserve all the contexts which any one digital object may have? Is that even possible?

I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of others on these issues as they were the ones which I kept coming back to again and again at the BL conference. I'm not sure what the answers are, but I am sure that these are questions that should be part of the conversation re archives 2.0.

twitter mosaic

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:04:00 +0000

I thought this was rather nice for a light Friday afternoon post. The image below is my twitter mosaic. Tip of the hat here to Euan as I found this via his blog.