Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era, Society of American Archivists, Chicago, 2011. 379 pp. ISBN 1 931666 38 5 (paperback). US$69.95.
Personal papers, personal archives, personal records, personal collections – whatever you call them, these materials have tended to fall between the different collecting and curatorial disciplines and professions. In the digital age, issues around personal collections have become even more complex and more interdisciplinary in nature, as well as steadily more pressing and urgent, as digital formats and services appear and disappear more rapidly. After more than 20 years of discussion in the professional literature – amply demonstrated in this volume’s 55-page bibliography – there is still uncertainty about the best way for the collecting professions to define and handle these materials.
This volume offers a valuable and wide-ranging collection of essays which examine conceptual issues, specific genres and types of documents, and the implications for memory institutions. Christopher Lee has assembled contributors from across the professions: archivists, librarians, academic researchers in the fields of recordkeeping and archival systems, and computer science researchers. They include two Australians – Adrian Cunningham and Sue McKemmish – as well as authors from Britain and North America. The absence of non-Anglophone viewpoints, while a little disappointing, is not a serious gap.
The absence of any creators of personal collections is more of a concern; where are the researchers, creative writers and other collectors speaking for themselves? This is particularly relevant when several of the contributors attempt to describe and define best practice for personal recordkeeping, notably in Cunningham’s ‘twelve principles’. Some of the essays include interesting reports on research into the behaviour of individual creators, but the overall perspective is very much that of the professional groups involved.
All the essays are well worth reading and considering, but two raise issues of particular urgency. Catherine Marshall – the Microsoft researcher well-known for her work on personal digital archiving – tackles the question of dealing with materials dispersed across numerous public or semi-public cloud-type systems. If a person’s digital collection is spread across Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and so on, what does this mean for the individual trying to organise these materials, let alone for the institutions trying to collect them? In a similar vein, Christopher Lee looks at the ‘appraisal of materials in the social web’ – in what sense can the notion of appraisal be applied to blogs and similar types of output?
It increasingly looks as though the digital age will require a complete re-thinking of what it means to collect, select and preserve personal materials. But this process will need to involve more than the updating of archival principles, in order to encompass new technologies. It will need to take into account the fundamental changes which are happening in the nature of research – the so-called Fourth Paradigm – as well as the ways in which digital ubiquity is affecting the very concepts of social memory and historical evidence. The digital age is challenging the whole nature and purpose of libraries and museums; archives face the same challenges. The essays in this volume are a valuable overview of current approaches and issues relevant to personal digital collections, but they also contain some pointers alerting us to even more profound changes.
© 2012, Toby Burrows