Instead of writing a traditional post for Day of Digital Archives this year, I'd like to link to the slides for a presentation I just did earlier this week for my library. Earlier this summer at UVa we went through a dramatic series of events related to the resignation and subsequent reinstatement of our University President. As Digital Archivist, I was involved in a larger library effort to create an archive of materials related to events. The campus community became quite active and vocal and organized several meetings and demonstrations using Twitter and Facebook -- a mini version of the so-called "Twitter Revolutions." My role, as I saw it was to act fast and try to save as much evidence of these activities as I could. The process was a challenge for many reasons, some technological, some legal, and some just human (I do need to sleep at some point, you guys!).

The slides themselves are embedded below, but if you choose to view them at SlideShare you can also view the slide notes, which are basically the narrative of what I said. It's much more informative with those!

McLuhan's Understanding Media: "The [digital] medium is [no longer] the [only] message."

Happy Day of Digital Archives

David Kay, nydawg [New York Digital Archivists Working Group]
October 6, 2011
McLuhan: “The Medium Is the Message?” or “The [digital] medium is [no longer] the [only] message.”

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the birth of “the new spokesman of the electronic age”, Marshall (Understanding Media) McLuhan, and digital archivists should take a moment to think about how media, digital and analog, hot and cool, and in many different formats change our jobs, lives and responsibilities. With threats of technological obsolescence, vendor lock-in, hardware failure, bit rot and link rot, non-backwards compatible software, and format and media obsolescence, digital archivists need a system to accurately describe digital objects and assets in their form and function, content, subject, object and context. If we miss key details, we run the risk of restricting access in the future because, for example, data may not be migrated or media refreshed as needed. By studying and understanding media, digital archivists can propose a realistic and trustworthy digital strategy and implement better and best practices to guarantee more efficiency from capture (and digitization or ingest) and appraisal (selection and description), to preservation (storage) and access (distribution).

Over the last ten, forty, one hundred and twenty thousand years, we have crossed many thresholds and lived through many profound media changes-- from oral culture to hieroglyphic communications to the alphabet and the written word, and from scrolls to books, and most recently transiting from the Atomic Age (age of atoms) to the Information Age (era of bits). While all changes were not paradigm shifts, many helped shift currencies of trust and convenience to establish new brand loyalties built on threats of imminent obsolescence and vendor lock-in. As digital archivists, we stand at the line separating data from digital assets, so we need to ensure that we are archiving and preserving the assets and describing the content, technical and contextual metadata as needed.

Want to read the rest? Check out the New York Digital Archivists Working Group [#nydawg] wordpress blog. Thanks for your interest in #DigitalArchivesDay #DoDA.