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Course Meeting Times
Mondays 1.00 p.m - 4.00 p.m, SZB 464
Course Description
The management, preservation, and use of electronic records and other
digital objects with enduring value are all as yet problems with only
partial solutions, although some progress has been made in the past few
years. There are two reasons for this open-ended situation: the supporting
technologies are changing constantly and change is accelerating; and creators
and users of these records (if not the records' potential managers and
preservers) are themselves caught up in a culture of immediacy that makes
the problems with electronic records invisible until some legal entanglement
brings them into sharp focus (as, for example, the destruction of records
by Enron, 9/11 terrorists, and as yet unidentified persons in Iraq). Yet
as governments and other human institutions have depended upon technologies
of memory to assure their longevity in the past, it is a safe bet that
they will continue to do so in at least the immediate future. For that
reason these problems must and will be solved by those who are charged
with the custody and preservation of such records, at least in a way that
will be good enough to achieve the ends of the institutions in question.
The problems are not just technological; if that were so they would (and
could) already have been solved. They are, more importantly, social, economic,
and political. The archivist called upon to solve them in a real-world
setting will have to understand not just a set of ideal archival requirements,
but how to cope with applying them to and tailoring them for an actual
functional environment, one where change never ceases, where the people
who create and use the records have other things to think about, and getting
it right once and for all is not an option.
Professor: Dr. Patricia K. Galloway
Teaching Assistant: Vidya Narayan
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