Lessons Learnt

Purpose
This paper will focus on a highly significant yet under-recognised concern: the huge growth in the volume of digital archival information, and the implications of this shift for information professionals.

Design/methodology/approach
Though data loss and format obsolescence are often considered to be the major threats to digital records, the problem of scale remains underacknowledged. The paper will discuss this issue, and the challenges it brings using a case study of a set of Second World War service records.

A gathering of over 50 records and archives practitioners tossed ideas around for 4 hours wrestling with the difficulties of what, when and how of establishing a digital archives. The occasion was a workshop put together by the Recordkeeping Roundtable duo, @CassPF and @BarbaraREED, as part of the ASA/ARANZ 2014 conference, to get our profession thinking about what is really involved in a digital archives.

As part of the Digital Humanities Congress 2014, Paola Marchionni presented the session “If I can’t find it, I can’t use it.” Some practical solutions to ensure your digital resources are easy to discover. The session described the initial outcomes of the Spotlight on the Digital project and the key recommendations for consideration in phase two of the project. The slides from the presentation are now available to view.
http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/dhc/paper/25

The Report on Digitisation, Online Accessibility and Digital Preservation of Cultural Material shows that there has been an increase of digitisation plans and overviews of digitised material, more cross-border collaboration and public-private partnerships as well as pooling of digitisation efforts through competence centres or specific aggregators.

Introduction

Digitization guidelines have proliferated in many forms over the last fifteen years, and all of them reflect a set of best practices that continues to evolve. These guidelines attempt to complement this body of knowledge by addressing the specific needs related to planning digitization projects for rare and special collections. They are written from the point-of-view of special collection managers, rare book librarians, curators, and researchers who study the physical object as an artefact bearing intrinsic historical evidence as much as for the intellectual content that it contains.

Archives is an innovative educational experience that places the student in the role of the decision maker, where one has to balance both resources and constraints. Through a dynamic process of idea exchange, students first learn about the situation, then identify and analyse the problems to determine the causes, and finally develop alternative strategies for a solution. Preservation Case Studies for Archives provides the context for teaching the real world issues confronting archives staff and managers in a dynamic and exciting way.

So, I’ve done my writing up of my notes from the ANADP II conference over on the Digital POWRR project blog.
I wanted to share some of my thoughts about themes and notions that I, personally, took away from the conference, particularly as a participant representing a project about smaller or less-well-resourced libraries, among a conference full of people working on projects at national or international scale.
In no particular order:

* .....

http://lynnemthomas.com/?p=1211

1 Digital newspapers and preservation. Mention this topic to a roomful of curators, and in our experience, the conversation will move in a few predictable directions.
2 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 Most of the curators will share that they (or their institution) manage some number of digital newspaper collections—mostly digitized, either in-house or by vendors. A few will share that they also manage born-digital content, either acquired from publishers directly or harvested via the Web.

Excellence in research, education, and public programming in the humanities depends heavily upon the ongoing availability of source materials. For instance, the discoveries and revelations of historians, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists, and others are credible and meaningful only to the extent that they are drawn from the raw materials and foundational building blocks of humanities knowledge.
http://www.neh.gov/files/divisions/preservation/hcrr_evaluation_report_2...