Archiving the Non-Organizational Born-Digital: The Challenges Posed by Material from Individuals, Communities, Social Movements, and Events

The transition from analog to digital creation and communication has forced archives and special collections to handle the vastly larger corpus of born-digital records that have already begun to enter our archives. The ubiquity of devices for recording and sending has not only increased the number of items that any individual creates, but has led to the creation of vast numbers of media types (digital videos and photographs, emails, tweets, social media postings, etc.) We need to find smart ways to handle this digital deluge, particularly ways to streamline the processes of selection/appraisal, ingest, and description.

In this presentation, Howard Besser will discuss his work with archivists, individuals, and community groups in addressing some of the challenges of this digital deluge. He will particularly look at the problems posed by personal, community, and event-based born-digital material — the type of material that documents the lives of ordinary people and the social and community organizations that they form. The presentation will illustrate some interesting activities that have come from the personal digital archiving community, as well as the work of activist archivists in documenting the Occupy Wall Street movement.