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INF 392K Digital Archiving and Preservation, Spring 2018, Unique #27435--Objectives
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The overall objective of this course is simple: if you as an archives or digital library professional are confronted with the need to construct an effective digital records repository for the purpose of reliable and permanent or potentially permanent preservation of records or other digital objects, you should know what the major difficulties are, what you need to do to meet them, the nitty gritty of the broad range of technologies that are potentially at issue, and where you can go for help. You also need to have done significant parts of these tasks. More specifically, students will learn:

1) What digital archiving is, anyway: its history and its relation to the history of technology (that's why I assign a few old readings)

2) How to use a digital records repository

3) Problems of structuring a logical digital records repository

4) Requirements for preserving digital objects with credible authenticity

5) How to capture, describe, structure, and maintain a digital fonds

6) How to provide access to permanent digital records while keeping them secure

You will learn, through consideration of the well-regarded and now widely accepted standard of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model and use of the DSpace instantiation of that model, what is required to construct and implement credible standards for your repository. Through group work on specific projects you will gain practical experience in working out all of these requirements for a real-world collection or creation environment.

This course is framed by several methods and activities. The first half of the course is focused on introducing you to the literature on digital archiving (and preservation and curation) so that you can see how thinking has changed since 1989/90, when a serious call to arms began high-level efforts to deal with the problems involved. The point of this is that it will help you understand how the practice is likely to evolve in the future, when you are actually doing it, and what to do when unpredictable changes in hardware and software kick in. I also want to acquaint you briefly with the history of computer technology as it has been involved in the creation of the actual digital objects that are now of interest to archives and institutions of cultural memory. Cultural value doesn't start with FaceBook.

Assigned readings are designed to expose you to these literatures and to accustom you in some cases to reading technical specifications, the point of which is to accustom you to taking control yourself of the technologies you need; I cannot stress enough how important this is. Class participation is crucial for me to understand whether you are taking in the readings effectively. This is especially important in that student projects will require that each student serve as a resource for his/her project partners in a designated area of expertise, which few students will fully possess at the beginning of the course. In the course of the semester students will be introduced to specific tools and resources for use in digital archiving.

Central to this course is the group project, which will be assigned early in the course so that group members can use their project needs to drive their careful reading and critique of assigned readings. The model for group project work is driven by work in two communities of practice: software engineering and design. As in a design studio, project groups will regularly confer and check the progress of their work with the instructor; as in software engineering education, project groups will regularly share with the class any specific problems they are encountering, so that groups can assist each other and avoid reinventing the wheel.

To encourage the development of reflective practice in digital archiving, students will keep a reflective journal of their project work, to be shared with the instructor so as to assist students with making the most of this aid to problem-solving and educational development--and to be evaluated at the end of the course.

Writing assignments that include individual and group writing tasks are intended to improve and focus your reading and writing skills.

Because many of the problems associated with permanent preservation of digital objects are social rather than technical, each student project, as well as requiring all students to work with others having varied skills, will entail working with a collection creator or curator and with advice from other experts, for example on copyright, privacy, and intellectual property as well as on unfamiliar technologies.

"Perilous to us all," said Gandalf, "are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves." (The Two Towers) This is a particularly scary observation in the context of digital archives. The practices of archivy as a discipline, particularly in the areas of ethics and the structure of bodies of documentation, are, I believe, crucially important to cultural preservation, but most are also deeply intertwined in the digital world with the technology that is part and parcel of the objects being archived. For that reason it is also important to resist the temptation to "hand it over to IT," whose expertise is often cognate but not fully coincident with emerging archival digital practice.