The article “Archivists Struggle to Preserve Crucial Records as Paper Gives Way to Pixels” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Florence Olsen, addresses the concerns over maintaining records of online information. The article focuses on important university documentation.
Several questions came to mind regarding the article:
1) If the information discussed is so crucial, why wasn’t it’s archival discussed before it was only documented online-only?
2) How does the tough decision of what to keep and what to throw-away in the digital world differ from the hard-copy world? Presumably the same decision must be made considering physical documents. Based on what records needed to be kept pre-Internet, it seems as though it would be fairly simple to know what online documents to print and archive.
3) Do we really need archived documentation of these items? Our culture (and that of Sweden and Germany) value written documentation much more than other countries. In areas like the Middle East, word-of-mouth agreements are valued with the same emphasis we place on written legal documents.
4) Why would you agree or disagree with the importance placed on keeping long-term records of grades? If they were archived for a year or two, wouldn’t that be sufficient?
5) Why not just print out copies of anything that needs to be archived?
[...] Christy – Preserving Crucial Records [...]