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More data, less process: a user-centered approach to email and born-digital archives

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posted on 2023-01-04, 14:17 authored by Lise JaillantLise Jaillant

The overall aim of this article is to push for access to born-digital archives, including email archives. It argues that the digital revolution has led to huge changes, but it also brought us back to an earlier situation. The world of big (digital) data is not so different from the world of big (paper) data. There is a danger of repeating the mistakes that were made in the twentieth century with large paper archives, which have often remained uncataloged, hidden, and inaccessible to users. The first section looks at the impact of the More Product, Less Process (MPLP) movement on archival repositories over the past fifteen years. Originally conceived as a response to the huge increase in paper records and uncataloged collections, MPLP has been increasingly applied to digitized collections to increase access. However, few institutions have applied MPLP to born-digital collections, and accessibility remains a huge problem. In the next section, this article presents the kind of research that can be done once access to these born-digital collections is achieved. The final section examines the MPLP approach in relation to artificial intelligence/machine learning.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Communication and Media

Published in

The American Archivist

Volume

85

Issue

2

Pages

533 - 555

Publisher

Society of American Archivists

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by the Society of American Archivists under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States Licence (CC BY-NC 3.0 US). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

Acceptance date

2021-08-10

Publication date

2022-12-28

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

0360-9081

eISSN

2327-9702

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Lise Jaillant. Deposit date: 2 September 2021

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