Guest Lecturers' slides:
Video podcasts:
- Archer's Tuesday Files: PDF file | PowerPoint File
- Prof. Hedstrom's Thursday Files: PDF File | PowerPoint File
- BAYU Files: PDF file | PowerPoint File
Video podcasts:
Week XII: Memory, Archives, and
Records
Guest Lecturers:
Archer Batcheller and Associate Professor Margaret Hedstrom
Major Topics:
Guest Lecturers:
Archer Batcheller and Associate Professor Margaret Hedstrom
Major Topics:
- Documentation, control, accountability, and transparency
- Documents and the making of facts and memories
- A public "right to know" vs. personal rights to privacy
- Provenance and the principles of organizing records
- Organizations and archival memory
- Transitioning cultural resources
- Enabling "cultural heritage tourism"?
Assigned Readings:
- James M. O’Toole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, (Introduction and Chapter 1)
- A genuine "breakthrough" article by John Seeley Brown, "The Social Life of Documents," from FIrstMonday.
- A piece on the dilemmas of accessing and preserving electronic records.
- This article invites you to ponder the dilemma: where should public demands for open access to public documents end and concerns for citizen privacy begin?
Recommended Readings:
- Some materials are very difficult to preserve digitally—think about works of art, for example, where problems of representation are paramount.
- Brown University's Taubman Center for Public Policy closely tracks the status of e-government; their reports are the best portrait of state-of-the art in e-government. Cruise the site if you're interested.
- An interesting piece on the preservation of digital art
- What does preserving digital rights for cultural heritage artifacts mean—protecting the rights of content owners, or the rights of the public to access heritage content? Clifford Lynch offers his views.
- Somewhat off-topic but relevant to the issue of public memory: an architectural critic looks at the WW2 memorial that mauls the aesthetics of the Washington Mall.
- A fascinating tale of the dogged effrts which have gone into preserving New York City's archives.
- Perhaps the niftiest of all electronic preservation efforts, the Wayback Machine, sponsored by Brewster Kahle; it's an accreting archive of the entire Web!
- A very handy one page guide from the [US] National Institute of Standards and Technology on the proper care and handling of CDs, CD-Rs, DVDs, and all manner of optical disk storage media.
- Finally, another FYI, a more systematic look at preserving optical digital media