2 results
1 - It's the end of the archival profession as we know it, and I feel fine
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- By Kate Theimer, author of the popular blog ArchivesNext and a frequent writer, speaker and commentator on issues related to the future of archives
- Edited by Caroline Brown
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- Book:
- Archival Futures
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 01 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 07 August 2018, pp 1-18
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
When I was approached to provide a plenary address for the Association of Canadian Archivists’ meeting in Montreal, I started out with a vague idea about exploring how technology is contributing to trends in innovation in archives. As a natural result, I've been trying to learn more about how technology and the internet are affecting other professions. I kept thinking that someone must be writing about this and lo and behold I found a book: The Future of Professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts by British father and son, Richard and Daniel Susskind. Published in 2016, it was exactly the book I was looking for, and it has changed my own thinking about the future of archives, as well as the main thrust of the talk I was to give. It gave me greater insight into trends I had already observed, what drives innovation and where the roots of the next phase of innovation lie for our profession. It provided evidence for my anecdotal observations and gut feelings, surfaced new ideas and challenged some old ones. It proved to be a great inspiration when writing the talk that provides the basis for this chapter.
My observations here draw heavily from the Susskinds’ book, but primarily in form of a remix, slicing and dicing their observations and pulling the ones that best illustrate how their argument applies to the archival profession and how it relates to what we're doing today and will be doing tomorrow. In a nutshell, the Susskinds argue that we are currently in the transitional phase between ‘a print-based industrial society’ and a ‘technology-based Internet society’ (Susskind and Susskind, 2016, 151). We can see around us indications of what that technology-based internet society will be like. When it fully arrives, it will be, they claim, radically different and will bring about the end of the professions as we know them today. The professions they focus on in the book are primarily law, medicine, accounting and the like, but their analysis seems applicable to archivists as well. In this chapter I will begin by summarising some of their observations about how the way we work has changed and will change, review some of the current trends they identify, put them in an archival context and address how they can contribute to our own innovation.
7 - Interactivity, flexibility and transparency: social media and Archives 2.0
- from Part 3 - Archive 20: archives in society
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- By Kate Theimer, is the author of the popular blog, ArchivesNext
- Edited by Jennie Hill
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- Book:
- The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 08 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 November 2010, pp 127-148
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Today it is impossible for most people to imagine the world without the world wide web. This year's ‘Mindset List’, which annually compiles a list designed to reveal the world as the year's college freshmen know it, noted that for these students ‘WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling’ (Beloit College, 2009). Although the term ‘internet’ was first applied to the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) system in 1974, it wasn't until it was opened to ‘commercial interests’ in 1988 that the public began to have access to (text only) services such as e-mail and bulletin boards (Wikipedia, accessed 2009). However, the date 6 August 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee first used hypertext in conjunction with the infrastructure provided by the internet, is generally credited as the birth of the world wide web (Wikipedia, accessed 2009). With the introduction of the first web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, most of the pieces of ‘Web 1.0’ were in place.
Beginnings of the world wide web
Most archives saw the value of using the web to publish information about themselves and their collections – usually in the form of putting finding aids online. In his 1995 article, ‘Archival Outreach on the World Wide Web’, William Landis (1995, 129, 133) reviewed four ‘fairly mature Web sites’, although he noted that an online list contained links to over 600 sites from ‘around the world’. Also appearing in 1995 was David Wallace's ‘Archival Repositories on the World Wide Web: A Preliminary Survey and Analysis’, which reviewed 15 archival websites. Both Landis and Wallace conclude their articles by considering the value the web provided to archives. For Wallace, the value lay in the possibilities presented by ‘data interchange standards’:
Since it is only through such standards that seamless virtual archives will cease to be institution-based and become user-driven. If the promise of hypertext and hypermedia is achieved, users will be able to leap from one site and collection to the next, tracing their unique research, education, and accountability needs across state and national borders without having to punch in a new URL [Uniform Resource Locator] or conduct stop-and-start searching.
(Wallace, 1995, 168)Like Wallace, Landis (1995, 145) envisioned one of the most significant aspects of the web to be the possibility to create ‘a “seamless web” of digital information about repositories and their collections’.