I posted this on the ICA Flying Reporters blog earlier in the month. I’m re-posting it here with a few updates.
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There’s an interesting article in the UK Guardian newspaper recently stating that there are now, on average, 7.2 ways to contact a person. Whilst this may at first seems like a large number, it’s actually pretty small. I sat down and counted up the number of ways I can be contacted and was not overly surprised to find that I double that number. I have:
- A landline phone
- A mobile phone (which kinda counts as two when you include calls v’s texts)
- A Skype account
- A Facebook account
- A Twitter account
- Five email accounts (gmail/family/home/work/Uni)
- Membership of two online forums with private messaging facilities (yes, only two!)
- My own blog, where I cann be contacted through the comments
- A home address for snail mail (yes, that one is bottom of the list)
I don’t think I’m unrepresentative of my generation, and I suspect there are many people of my generation with even more communications channels open to them. I don’t have a Second Life life, for example (though I do have an as yet unused account), and I don’t have a MySpace. No doubt there are many people not of my generation who are the same – take Stephen Fry, for example. He’s a prolific Twitterer. So is Obama – search for twitter using Google and the second result (for me) is Twitter/BarackObama, with the by-line ‘brief reports from the president on what he’s doing and thinking’.
So what does this mean for archivists? At the very least, it will impact on the perceived ‘completeness’ of our collections, certainly insofar as personal archives are concerned (eg Stephen Fry). Not only do we face the challenge of identifying and capturing these communications, but we must also capture as many as possible – it may not be enough to just get one or two and use them as a ‘representative sample’. This is because most communications are split over several channels; capturing just one therefore means you only get part of the story and you’re missing vital context and further information to make sense of what you’ve got. For example, I use the internet to remain in touch with an ex-colleague. We communicate by Facebook, Twitter, and email. Oh, and he has a blog that I sometimes post messages to, and a YouTube channel. Some of our conversations are cross-media; they may start on Twitter, but they move to Facebook and then the blog. Capturing only one of those accounts means that only part of our conversation is captured. Okay, so you’re probably not interested in capturing our interactions in your archives. But you probably are interested in capturing interactions from important people (back to Stephen Fry and Obama again) and you will thus face the same issues.
Of course, this is notwithstanding the technical problems we face in capturing this information in the first place. We all know the problems we’ve got in capturing and archiving emails. What of Twitter? How do you get Tweets out of the system and integrate them into a collection? What of Facebook data? And YouTube?
I’ve started to refer to some of these types of informationas ‘born online’. They are different to ‘born digital’ information because of their essentially public and social nature. I need to sit down and think about this in more detail – that’ll be another blog post in the offing then – and I’ll re-visit this topic again once I’ve had a chance to do that
In the meantime, the Digital Lives conference at the British Library also touched on some of these issues. I wasn’t able to attend in person, nor in Second Life (it apppears the my Graphics Card just wasn’t up to scratch), but I have come across a couple of blog posts from people who were fortunate enough to make it – see Alan Bell’s blog – One Man Typing – and Alexandra Eveleigh’s blog – 80GB around the World. All useful stuff, and I look forward to seeing the presentations appear on the Digital Lives website at a later date.
