Facilitating the Aggregation of Dispersed Personal Archives a Proposed Functional, Technical, and Business Model

Facilitating the Aggregation of Dispersed Personal Archives A Proposed Functional, Technical, and Business Model Christopher J. Prom Assistant University Archivist and Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Abstract We keep records in archives because such institutions are dedicated to preserving authentic evidence of human activity. ‘Cloud’ services pose a direct challenge to the archival mission. Archivists and all of humanity have a direct interest in building tools that help people aggregate, use, and control records they created. This paper outlines the conceptual model one such service, which is dubbed “myKive,” and which is currently undergoing proof-of-concept development at the University of Illinois. After describing its necessity, the paper lists the proposed service’s functions, outlines its core architecture, and describes it development/business framework. Author Christopher J. (Chris) Prom is Assistant University Archivist and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Illinois and also studied at the University of York (United Kingdom). He is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists and has received several other research fellowships including most recently a 2009-10 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award. He maintains the Practical E-Records Blog and an active publication portfolio. His research describes the ways in which archival users seek information relevant to their needs and assesses methods that archivists can use to efficiently meet those needs. He most recently authored a technical watch report for the Digital Preservation Coalition, “Preserving Email.” Chris is also co-director of the Archon™ project, which developed an open source application for managing archival descriptive information and digital objects, and he is a member of the ArchivesSpace project, which is developing a next-generation archival management system. He has served the Society of American Archivists in several capacities. He is currently a member of the editorial board of The American Archivist. I would like to begin my paper with a story. The story demonstrates key challenges faced by archives and archivists in what we might term the cloud era—the era of dispersed digital archives. Last November, I boarded a train at Union Station in Chicago, Illinois. I had just a left a meeting of the Society of American Archivists’ Fundamental Change Working Group. This group was charged with revising the Fundamentals Series, which comprises the heart of our society’s publishing program.1 1 The six books that comprise this series are available by visiting the publications pages at the Society of American Archivists website, at http://bit.ly/LyVy06 (Accessed June 26, 2012). Everyone at the meeting was acutely aware of two facts: 1) that newly trained archivists need a sophisticated set of digital skills, and 2) that our new instructional manuals must facilitate these skills. Moving quickly to find a seat on the train, I spotted a person from my University. I’ll call this person “Dr. Important.” After the requisite chic-chat, Dr. Important asked me what I have been working on lately. “Well, I’ve been writing a guide to email preservation.” “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe you can help me.” Who doesn’t like to be asked for help? Maybe I could tell Dr. Important how to organize email and export it to a preservation-ready format. If lucky, I might even convince Dr. Important to transfer email to the University Archives, where it would become a public research resource. In this way, it would be accessible much like the handwritten or typescript correspondence from many other important people who had worked or studied at the University of Illinois in past years. “You see, I went to look for something I sent back in 2009,” Dr. Important continued. “I’ve been keeping a copy of all of my important emails, one folder for each month. But when I went back to find the message I needed, all the folders were gone.” Dr. Important told me that technical staff could not restore the emails, which likely went missing during a system migration that had taken place several months prior. As an archivist, I mourned the death of the evidence and information that Dr. Important had created and cared for over many years. But I felt helpless, and l let the conversation drift to another topic. This incident, and many others that I could tell from my time at the University of Illinois, illustrate one of the greatest challenges that archivists face: ensuring the preservation of evidence when people’s communication tools have, in effect, become their unofficial recordkeeping mechanisms. This problem is particularly pressing because, in most institutions, centralized systems to manage correspondence and other communications are dead or at least have one foot firmly in the grave. Given this fact, what can we (as a profession) do to make sure that usable records are fixed into a medium that will facilitate their perseveration and use? In order to answer that question, we must understand the ways in which information is dispersed within modern organizations and external social networks. More to the point, we must understand the way in which technology makes information into records that subsist within human social networks. With a better understanding of how records are formed and used within the technologies that facilitate such networks, we will be better positioned to capture and preserve not only information, but also contextual data about how that information was dispersed, used, and reused. 1. ‘Record-ness,’ Archives, and the Need for a Personal Archives Service In the cloud era, record capture and preservation systems must take three factors into account: 1) the perceived lack of value accorded to preserving digital communications; 2) the communication and information management practices used by individuals and; 3) the specific ways in which contextual data transforms information into evidence, within human social networks and the technologies that support them. Taken as a whole, the implications of these three factors call into question the continued existence of archives in the cloud environment—if by archives we mean a group of records that are maintained as a collective using the principles of provenance, original order, and collective control. 2 1.1 The perceived lack of value accorded to preserving digital communications In 1899, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote that “the cheap, and therefore indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are commonly machine products.” 2 Such articles are much used but little valued, at least in a monetary sense. For that reason, they are easily lost or discarded. Any American who has eaten at a Fourth of July picnic knows how easy it is to throw dirty plastic utensils and plates into the trash, in spite of their utility when the hot dogs and watermelon were being served. In post-industrial societies, digital communications comprise one of the cheap, and therefore indecorous, articles of daily consumption. We are familiar with the forms that these materials take: email messages, blog posts, Facebook updates, tweets, online videos. Each can be inexpensively produced with the help of an electronic device. Each is arguably less decorous than the format for communication that it replaced, such as the handwritten letters, illustrated diaries, or professionally produced films in which archives like to traffic.3 Given this fact, one may expect that the greatest challenge in preserving such materials might consist simply in convincing people that their personal digital communications are important enough to preserve. But this is not the case. In the abstract, many people value digital materials highly and keep everything they send or create. However, most of them do not much concern themselves when a system crash sweeps digital records away as in a flood.4 This points to an important truism: the broader information ecology in which people work makes it very difficult for both organizations and individuals to identify, capture, and preserve the records that have the most long-term archival value, unless extraordinary actions are taken. Let me provide a few examples. My own institution, the University of Illinois, formerly made extensive use of college and departmental subject files, documenting faculty teaching, research, service, and administration. I say ‘formerly’ because over the past twenty years these paper-based files have largely disappeared. During the same period, most of our distinguished faculty members stopped keeping systematic correspondence files, aside from messages fortuitously retained within active email accounts. Asking administrators or faculty members to keep records outside of their communication applications (either in paper or in digital form) seems like a fruitless task. First, it would require that the institution implement an expensive software and hardware product, such as and Electronic Records Management (ERM) application. More to the point, implementing such a system would require that people make extensive changes to their work habits and procedures—something that is extremely unlikely in the Facebook Era, with its emphasis on immediate communication and response. Where ERM or ‘document management’ systems have been implemented, we see numerous problems follow. For example, staff in the office of our chief administrative officer (the Chancellor) are worried that email messages documenting critical policy decisions never make their way into the document management system since administrators don’t like to change their work habits and deposit email. Staff members are also worried that the system will not survive the departure of the current records manager. 2 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 161, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/833. 3 For one attempt to provide a more decorous platform for personal reminiscence and storytelling in the digital era, see the Cowbird service, founded by Jonathan Harris, at http://cowbird.com (Accessed June 26, 2012).

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