Stewardship in the Digital Age (Continued)

During the Spring 2023 semester of the Information Access Seminar, I’ll continue the series of talks exploring the issues of stewardship in the digital age that I started in Fall 2022.

Continuing the discussion from last week, I expect to complete the survey of the scope of the challenge for stewardship in the digital age. I will cover a final set of case studies dealing with telemetry and sensing data broadly (including environmental, weather, “smart cities”, remote sensing and similar collections of data) and commercial and governmental data and telemetry broadly (including financial records, insurance records, business records, census data). I’ll focus on questions of what should be part of the cultural record, and how it should be incorporated in this record.

After this, I’ll consider a number of “edge cases”, such as software (particularly open-source software), data dumps and stolen data, and what we might call “abandoned data”, and make some concluding comments about stewardship in an age of abundance, and issues related to acquisition/appraisal and de-acquisition policies and processes.

Future talks will move beyond the scope of the challenge to examine legal and policy issues, institutional and collector roles, and transfers of stewardship responsibility, among other topics.

This seminar will be held both online & in person. You are welcome to join us either in South Hall or via Zoom.

For online participants

Online participants must have a Zoom account and be logged in. Sign up for your free account here. If this is your first time using Zoom, please allow a few extra minutes to download and install the browser plugin or mobile app.

Join the seminar online