More data, less process: a user-centered approach to email and born-digital archives
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 ArchivistVolume
85Issue
2Pages
533 - 555Publisher
Society of American ArchivistsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorPublisher 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
2021-08-10Publication date
2022-12-28Copyright date
2022ISSN
0360-9081eISSN
2327-9702Publisher version
Language
- en