Page History

...

Mark A. Matienzo <mark.matienzo@yale.edu>
Digital Archivist, Manuscripts and Archives
Yale University Library

Catherine Hobbs

I am Catherine Hobbs, Literary Archivist (English-language) at the Library and Archives Canada.  My areas of research and publishing are personal archives (the archives of individuals/families rather than organizations) and literary archives.  I am also the founding Chair of the Special Interest Section on Personal Archives (SISPA) within the Association of Canadian Archivists.

My areas of interest concerning born-digital archives have to do with the way in which personal digital archives are currently being created and maintained in both more traditional desktop environments and in dispersed cloud computing, the web, and portable devices.  In order to break open some of these questions and get fresh perspective, I've hosted two dialogues in the SISPA group: one with Cathy Marshall of Microsoft and one with Susan Thomas of the Bodleian (about the PARADIGM project--looking forward to meeting you Susan!).  Last year, I led the Institute on Personal Archives through the ACA and we hosted Laura Carroll who spoke about Emory's Salman Rushdie Digital Archives Project.

To me the salient questions have to do with how to capture the context of these records in a way which reflects the digital lives (or hybrid analog/digital lives) of their creators.  In what ways do we reconstrue original order within these fonds, for example?  Digital contexts have profound impacts for appraisal methodologies and for the types of questions we need to be asking archives creators when we first approach them. Of course this has further implications for interpreting arrangement and for archival description. In the published literature we are only beginning to scratch the surface of many of these issues.  There are other issues which are particular to literary archives and archives of creative artists more generally which play out here as well.

Looking forward to participating in the symposium with you....

Catherine

...