Are We Losing Our (Paper) Minds? Processing Analog Collections in the Digital World / Lara Michels,...
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Are we losing our (paper) minds? Processing analog collections in the digital world Lara Michels NCTPG Annual Program 23 May 2014 post- digital
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Most archivists work, and for the foreseeable future will continue to work, in hybrid environments where analog and digital coexist and where the perception and treatment of one is informed and sometimes limited by the existence of the other. Analog collections are rendered in digital surrogates surrounded and supported by standardized digital metadata. Born-digital materials can be sorted and placed into desktop “folders” in an act that models familiar behavior with analog material and provides a comforting illusion of physicality. This presentation will look at how the mingling of analog and digital systems in the 21st-century archival institution affects, for better or worse, the perceptions and decisions of archivists working on the 20th-century paper backlog. Is the rapidly growing presence of digital systems in analog archival processing causing us to lose our (paper) minds? If so, does it matter? Lara Michels is an archivist currently working on the “quick kills” project to increase access to the paper manuscripts backlog of the Bancroft Library. She is also an historian with a PhD from Brandeis University.
Transcript of Are We Losing Our (Paper) Minds? Processing Analog Collections in the Digital World / Lara Michels,...
Are we losing our (paper) minds?
Processing analog collections in the digital world
Lara MichelsNCTPG Annual Program23 May 2014
post-digital
Digital Solutionism
Digital Age
Pipes and Plumbing
Archivists in the Digital Age
Traditional Archival Paradigm
● the sanctity of evidence;
● respect des fonds, provenance, and original order;
● the life cycle of records;
● the organic nature of records; and
● hierarchy in records and their descriptions.
Post-Digital Age
● In the post-digital age, the digital is commonplace and accepted, rather than something exciting and new. --Adam Tinworth
● The post-digital condition is a post-apocalyptic one: the state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused by the computerisation and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics.--Florian Cramer
We’re finally moving past the twin elephants in the room of technological conversation. Infatuation with everything shiny and digital, and that nostalgic, ‘Lead Pencil Club’ clinging to the past. We’re finally getting to the point where we can decide which are the appropriate technologies to use based simply on their actual merits. And, we’re starting to understand how to combine analog and digital in effective ways. -- Russell Davies
Terry Cook
long-established, customary, time-honored, established, classic, accustomed, standard, regular, normal, conventional, usual, orthodox, habitual, set, fixed, routine, ritual, old, age-old, ancestral
Paper Mind
Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections and the Princeton Finding Aids Project
In the new millenium, the media landscape is changing far faster than our institutions, so we now find ourselves in situations where print-born assumptions linger and intermingle with practices such as social media networking, tweeting, hacking, and so on… -- N. Katherine Hayles
The Age of Print is passing, and the assumptions, presuppositions, and practices associated with it are now becoming visible as media-specific practices rather than the largely invisible status quo. --N. Katherine Hayles
Digital Humanities
2013 2012
Media Archaeology and Media History
Friedrich Kittler Lisa Gitelman Cornelia Vismann
More Media Archaeology
Erkki Huhtamo Wolfgang ErnstMichael Z. Newman
