Email as Archives: You Have to Have it Before You Worry About It

"I am going to talk about the Digital Dark Age—and I love that concept—for reasons I’ll say in a minute. And I also want to thank the Kernochan Center and the Rockefeller Archives Center for the invitation to be here today. For reasons that will be apparent in my talk, I’ve been chomping at the bit to talk to lawyers about some of the problems we’re having in our current work. It’s been interesting to reflect on the sessions earlier in the focus on intellectual property and copyright. I think that sort of pertains to stuff we already have, and my focus is looking to the future, anticipating collections that we’re going to get. In this context, I think it’s important to distinguish between archives and special collections, because the context of what I’m talking about is our integral work with the archives of our own institution. As Bill was saying at the beginning, institutional archives have a sort of organic relationship to their records, and we’re entering into that kind of organic relationship. It’s a different kind of relationship that we have with our own materials versus what we might have with a historical collection that we go out and get and bring in. So we’re finding that it’s really more—in dealing with this—a cultural problem than a technical problem, for reasons that I’ll mention.

Questions and Answers

"I was curious about websites because we’re now beginning to accumulate websites and we were thinking about using a website service so it makes it very simple just to find it, click it, ship it and we have archival access to it. But the problem of course is these websites are so complicated and you don’t actually know what you’re fully accessing because there are lots of links; there are lots of portions that may go unexamined. Have you had any experiences with websites that are essentially transnational, that are essentially built in this country but linked to things that are governed by laws outside of U.S. control?

Fashion archive fervour: the critical role of fashion archives in preserving, curating, and narrating fashion

Fashion items and artefacts across the 19th and 20th centuries were once considered unworthy of placement in museums and archives on account of their perishable nature and their association with the shallow pleasures of low culture. The perceived fragile and ephemeral nature of fashion garments and accessories has been reevaluated with material objects now considered worth saving for multiple purposes and uses. Awareness of the high social, cultural, economic, and historic value of physical fashion relics has resulted in the trend for fashion designers, brands, and museums to collate, create, and manage fashion archives. The article analyses the importance for both industry and consumer of preserving and accessing fashion archives in the 21st century in both digital and traditional ways. It highlights the benefits of collating a holistic multi-modal archive by combining material and textual cultural objects in various forms to portray and contextualize the lived social experience. A case study will analyse a selected educational fashion archive based in postcolonial Hong Kong. The contemporary fashion archive’s role is evaluated from the perspective of archivist and user regarding contested issues such as commercialization, curatorial objectivity, or controlled access, while evaluating future directions for the fashion archive as ultimate style repository

Documenting the arts at the Bentley Historical Library.

"Concert given by the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the collections housed in the Bentley Historical Library, September 26, 2010 ... Arie Lipsky, conductor. ... Welcoming remarks Mary Sue Coleman, President University of Michigan."--p. [2]Cover title.Mode of access: Internet