One man typing...

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.

twittering archivists

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:40:00 +0000

Just in case you've missed it this week (and if you don't use twitter you may well have) there's been something of an explosion of record keepers and repositories using twitter and following each other. It all stemmed from a post on David's Digital Archive blog where he listed 15 people that archivists may want to follow. This caused something of a rush of new connections between those of us who use twitter. As David said in his follow up, no one is sure where this will go but 'a small, vocal and flourishing micro-blogging community' seems to have been created.

Kate also mentioned the new connections on twitter this week on her ArchivesNext blog. As is usual with Kate's blog, the comments are great and really worth reading. I left a comment there on why and how I use twitter and I've reproduced it below as context and a brief explanation of why I think the service has so much potential.

[There are lots of different ways to take advantage of twitter. We're using] the @CAIS_Archives account as a one-many feed that can also be rendered in different places (on a website, a blog, an intranet etc).

I struggled to see the value of my own account (@Al30) at first as it just seemed to be another tool for throwing things out there and I wasn’t sure if I needed that. What changed for me was when I found myself following 10-15 people saying (and linking to) interesting or useful things (as well as all the fluff about the weather/pets/food etc). That meant I starting getting a constant drip of things that I found worthwhile. The stage after that was when I started to enjoy the fluff too and developed a much more rounded picture of the people I was following.

Ultimately, I think the beauty of twitter is its simplicity. Everyone uses it in their own way and for their own purposes. Consequently everyone finds their own value in the service. I think that’s why twitter has the traction it does and why it seems to fascinate so many people.

twittering in the office

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

As a quick follow up to my posts about twitter last year, I thought I'd mention that we're starting to use twitter at work as a way of putting out little items of news, links etc. If you're interested in finding out how well this goes you can see our tweets and follow us here. We'll also be adding a feed from twitter to our website soon.

computers for the cloud?

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:20:00 +0000

In this age of 2-3lb web books, calling a 22lb computer that 'could fit on the passenger seat of your car' portable seems faintly ridiculous. It is worth pausing now and again to remember just how far computers have developed in the last twenty and a bit years (and how much information has been lost to technical obsolescence).

[I stumbled across this when I was looking at the ad I linked to yesterday.]

selling records management

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:11:00 +0000

A colleague pointed me to this advert recently, although I suspect it has been around for while and I simply haven't noticed it. I really wasn't sure about linking to it as it smacks of a company trying rather too hard for a viral marketing success. However, it is quite fun (not something we say about records management that often) and it is Friday evening. Just close your eyes during the product pitch at the end...

a bit of a tidy up

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:50:00 +0000

If you stop off here from time to time you may have noticed that I've been altering the look and feel of the blog recently. The old look had evolved over the year or so since I started writing here and things were getting cluttered as the posts stacked up and new elements were added. I've refreshed things by using one of Blogger's most basic templates with a few tweaks here and there. I try not to blog about blogging too often as it can all get a bit too self-absorbed for my tastes, but I thought this was worth mentioning in a post just to let people know I've finished tinkering with things for now. I hope you think it's been worth the effort.

a tech-free White House?

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:10:00 +0000

The candidates in the recent US election campaign exploited online technology to an unprecedented extent. There's a great post on Brian Solis' blog about that and whether the use of technology in the campaigns creates the potential for a two-way conversation with the President.

However, listening to TWiT during the drive to work this morning, I was fascinated by the debate about whether any President could even use something as basic as email for communication, let alone social media. The assertion on that show seemed to be that the Presidential Records Act automatically leads to any communication from or to the President being captured as part of the public record and potentially subject to discovery processes. Indeed, it seems that President Bush stopped using email upon his entry to the White House for that very reason.

I don't know the US law at all so I'd be interested to here comments from colleagues in the States about the reach of this Act. Is there no distinction made between personal correspondence (to family and friends etc) and the official record of the actions of the office-bearer? Will the President Elect have to give up email unless what he is writing is solely for the purpose of conducting his duties?

EDIT: I've looked at the text of the Act and it does appear to draw a distinction between 'Persidential' and 'personal' records and the summary on the NARA website makes the point that every effort should be made to keep personal records out of formal record keeping systems. If that distinction exists why is there so much concern that personal correspondence and communication is potentially discoverable?

EDIT: Comments on the same issue from a blogging archivist in the USA who offers some insight.

context is king?

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:27:00 +0000

Paul Miller wrote a fascinating post yesterday on the potential of the cloud and cloud computing. There is lots of interest in that piece, but the following passage struck me as resonant with many of the debates in our profession.

'Even the most specialised, the most proprietary, the most confidential of data only reveal their true value when placed in context, and that context is all the richer when informed by numerous perspectives.'

missing links - archives/rm 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:24:00 +0000

In an attempt to keep on top of the archives/RM 2.0 debate (mainly for my own benefit), there are a couple of things I've missed in my recent posts that I should have noted.

Jane Stevenson of the Archives Hub posted her thoughts on the ArchivesNext post that triggered much of the debate on the archives side of things here. Gordon Belt of the Posterity Project blog has also rounded up some useful links in this post.

I should also mention the social network that Steve established on Ning to discuss ideas around the term Records Management 2.0 with colleagues.

EDIT: David has tracked down another post on archives 2.0 from New Zealand and linked to it here.

preservation -v- access in a Web 2.0 world

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:37:00 +0000

Russell has posted a strong rebuttal of the some of the points that Steve made in the comments on one of my posts (reproduced below). In his post (as in his previous one) Russell makes the case that the balance between user access and the preservation of the record has to be on the side of preservation and that as a profession we must be careful to maintain the integrity of the record as we adopt Web 2.0 technologies.

Russell highlights a key aspect of the archives/RM 2.0 debate that must be considered as definitions of archives and records management 2.0 are developed. Are we simply talking about understanding the information in these systems and capturing it as part of the record or is our discussion broader than that as the manifestos would seem to suggest? Where should our efforts be focussed?

EDIT: Steve has provided a response to Russell's rebuttal in the comments on Russell's post.

defining our terms

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Bell) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:18:00 +0000

Steve and Kate have both been kind enough to comment on my post concerning Russell's call for continued debate about the terms archives and records management 2.0 and their associated manifestos.

Steve's points in response to the detail of Russell's post are too well made and far too relevant in the context of the ongoing debate to be lost in the comments on a blog so (with Steve's approval) I've reproduced them in full below:

'hmm. First decision: where to post this response? The debate is spreading to so many places its difficult to know where is the right place...I guess here is as good a place as any!

Firstly, I think Russell falls into what appears to be a rather common misapprehension about the purpose of the Manifesto (certainly the RM one and I suspect the others too). They are not supposed to be a set of compulsory rules. Its not a case of 'you must sign up and abide by them at all times or cease to be an archivist'. Russell obviously carries around a fair amount of personal cultural baggage about the term 'manifesto' which I suspect is largely responsible for colouring his view here.

Secondly, I'm wondering if Russell has actually missed one of the fundamental characteristics of Web2.0 technology - and that is its (almost) permanent Beta status. Take a look at most Web 2.0 services and products and you will see that they are always in beta development and never finalised. It is an integral part of the nature of the technology, but has implications far beyond this in terms of its potential management. If we continue to insist on waiting for perfection and 'declaration as the final record' before getting involved we are doomed to professional irrelevance in this world.

Thirdly. Like it or not, archives and records management are a service profession. Not only are we fundamentally reliant on users to carry out most of the measures we seek to implement, but we are also reliant on them (either directly or indirectly) for funding our services. A&RM may have a theoretical professional core, but that does not mean that we can simply turn around to users and say 'its my way, or the highway'. Continue to take that attitude and popular opinion of our role will very soon shift from 'trusted gatekeeper and advisor' to 'unjustifiable barrier to our cultural heritage' and we will only have ourselves to blame.'

Kate has also written another great post trying to to pull together all the different elements of this burgeoning debate (and as someone who has tried to do that too, and knows how complicated the process is, I appreciate her efforts). In her new post Kate also attempts to begin to develop a distinction between archives 1.0 and archives 2.0, picking up on some of the points that Steve and I have made in relation to the problem of definition associated with the term records management 2.0. She suggests that

'The appellation “2.0″ (taken from software engineering) implies a new version of a product. To echo Steve’s argument, I think we’re discussing a new version of archives, with enough changes to justify a new version number, but still fundamentally the same product.'

I think that is a very useful perspective and if the common understanding of the term archives or records management 2.0 becomes that it represents the next version, a development of what has gone before, rather than a fundamental shift in purpose or values, I, for one, would be comfortable with that. However, I think what has become apparent during this debate is that we don't have an agreed point of reference. We are debating a number of different but related issues around the adoption and use of Web 2.0 by ourselves and our organisations under the umbrella of archives/RM 2.0 without really reaching an agreement on what those terms mean. I suggest, therefore, that the next step is clear...