Hi
My administration are pushing for every record/document to be digitized and the paper records dating back to the late 1800s be destroyed.
I urgently need to know are there any records that must be kept in their original format even if they are digitized?
Replies
From a purely political point of view, have they considered the possible public relations ramifications if something goes wrong during the transition process? I would think any religious institution (especially a national headquarters) would need to be very careful in the current environment, of the mass destruction of records. I think that this would give you a strong case for the need to review holdings and have best practice policies in place before any physical records were destroyed.
Hi Rose-lee
Where will the digital objects be stored and how often will they be checked? Are you merely swapping damp storage for limited storage? Do you have a digital preservation program to maintain the records? These are all questions that need to be asked or considered.
It may also be that some of the earlier items are not all that amenable to digitisation and all of them, as you say, will need some minor treatment before digitisation begins.
Have a look at the Digital Preservation Handbook, which addresses some of the issues. http://handbook.dpconline.org/
At our library here at College of Micronesia-FSM, we do digitize only those papers and documents which are not copyrighted. And when they are digitized, the paper format is kept for it's authenticity and originality. We never throw away original copy of the paper format since these documents serves as evidence of an action. Another reason is that we don't have reliable electric power that can always be up for 24/7. This is my two pennies contribution to this topic. Thank you.
An extremely good point - no power/no resources. Paper can be seen without technology or power. Thank you for your response.
Be carereful! A digital representation is a digital surrogate, various stages removed from the original. See Alicia Rekrut, Reconnecting Mind and Matter: Materiality in Archival Theory and Practice, Master’s thesis University of Winnipeg, 2009, available at a href="http://hdl.handle.net/1993/3161">http://hdl.handle.net/1993/3161>;. See also Charles Jeurgens, The Scent of the Digital Archive. Dilemmas with Archive Digitisation, bmgn - Low Countries Historical Review, 128-4 (2013) pp. 30-54, available at http://www.bmgn-lchr.nl/index.php/bmgn/article/view/9348. Mak, Bonnie. "Archaeology of a digitization." Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65.8 (2014): 1515-1526.
Eric Ketelaar
Hey, thank you very much. Good stuff.
At one point in history it was 'word perfect' now it is 'word', PDF or TIFF, another 20 years I am guessing it will be something else? You are right we do have a real problem, are organizations prepared to spend the money to reformat everything multiple times or are they just going to say, not enough people are using the data so destroy it?
Policy link
Hi Rose-lee,
You might like to have a look at a 'disposal after digitisation' policy (see link above) that the National Archives issued recently, to authorize disposal of records in its custody after digitisation. The policy exempts records with 'intrinsic value' in the original medium (and defines this) or a legal requirement to keep. It also requires that the records be digitized to a 'functional equivalence' of the source record, and stored in an environment that ensures their long term preservation and access. Disposal is authorized by a general disposal authority, although specific authorities are required for situations which aren't covered by the authority - your mould -affected records may fit into that category
Linda
Good point. Some of the moldy items are early 1900s hand written minutes and financial records.
The mold is treatable as far as I am concerned, but once a record is destroyed/disposed of that is it! I want to save these records in hard form mainly because I really do not trust digital.
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