Before I left for my Fulbright orientation, I spent some time sketching out a detailed research plan for the next few months. (This has reminded me that it is one thing to lay out a proposal, it is another to actually have a decent method to accomplish it in a limited period of time) Two articles in particular have helped sharpened my research focus, so I thought I’d put my thoughts down before they totally escape me.
Adrian Cunningham’s piece in the American Archivist, “Digital Curation/Digital Archiving: A View from the National Archives of Australia” is an opinion piece, and Cunningham argues that archivists need to assert a strong role in helping records creators preserve the evidential value and context of records “before the point of creation for as long as those records are required by their creators and by society as large.” [p. 533]. He himself points out that it’s cliché to say this, but he uses to the point to rather effectively criticize what he see as an unthinking reliance upon the OAIS reference model as the end-all-be-all model for ‘digital archives’ planning. He sees OAIS as a valuable but ultimately insufficient framework for understanding the range of tasks that are needed to fulfill the archival mission because it is silent regarding the myriad activities that need to take place prior to information being ‘ingested’ into a repository.
Most of his article concerns the mission and policy changes that the National Archives of Australia made in the 1990s and early 2000s. (Most of the key policy documents and agency guidance are provided on the Information Management Section of NAA’s records management website.) Cunningham argues that the general effect has been to improve governement’s ability to keep accurate and authentic records and to lay a solid foundation for their digital preservation project–which NAA considered a subsidiary issue until recordkeeping itself had been made more effective so that there were decent records to preserve.
Obviously many other projects, including the Pittsburgh Project and InterPARES have also argued quite persuasively in favor of the continuum approach to archives and records management, defining functional requirements for electronic recordkeeping, etc. It would be silly to argue that we should NOT work with records creators in helping them to manage their records in a way that preserves their authenticity. But, at the same time, a nagging thought ran through my head after reading Cunningham’s piece: “What should we do with the vast majority of digital records created over the past thirty or forty years that were not created and managed with our help?”
Even if we are successful in helping manage current and records across their continuum of existence, we still need methodological approaches and tools that will allow us to work effectively when an agency or donor dumps records on our digital doorstep. To put this a bit more provactively, is the argument that we must save records creators from themselves distracting us from the issue where we are failing: dealing with the records they’ve already created? I keep thinking of that folder labelled e-records sitting on our server, hanging over my head like a pendulum.
That’s why I found an article in the most recent issue of Archival Issues, the journal of the Midwest Conference of Archives, so liberating. Sarah Kim, Lorraine Dong and Megan Durden (three former students of Pat Galloway) describe a method they call “automated archival batch processing,” which they developed through trial and error while processing about 7,000 pieces of correspondence by the British playwright Arnold Wesker.
Admittedly, they went into the project with a bit of a backwind in the fact that Wesker actually kept his records well organized and they were wordperfect and MS word files. Still, they set out an achievable, fairly efficient method for dealing with the entire range of tasks related to appraising, arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to a substantial set of e-records using either open source, free, or low-cost software. It really is worth seeking out this article, because if focuses lazer-like on the realy problems in dealing with e-records, not theoretical issues. (It appears to be only available in print.)
Anyway, while I’ve been reading these articles, I’ve also been knee deep tracking down projects and software tools. I’ve begun to list some of the ones I have looked at under resources (the page is really a work in progress, so please don’t click the link).
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I feel confirmed in my impression that the one thing I can contribute over the limited amount of time I have to work on this project is to assess methods, tools and procedures víz-a-víz one simple question: ”What would you do if a donor drops _____________ electronic records off at your repository? (__________ being some sets of test records that I have in my possession–more on that later.)
By trying out these tools and methods I’m assembling on my resources pages with actual sets of records,I’m hoping to come to some preliminary conclusions, at least regarding which tools work, which ones don’,t and which ones are missing–for records that we get at the end of their lifecycle or when approached by a donor.
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