Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations

摘要

Over the past few years, Richard Cox has been grappling with, and writing about, the mounting challenges of preserving digital records and web products - email, tweets, blogs, and websites - produced by the public in Records and Information Management Report and his personal blog, Reading Archives. This substantial work, Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling, attempts to consolidate all of his thoughts and findings relating to this topic, as well as the broader issue of preserving traditional personal records such as correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, home videos, and photo albums, in order to convince information professionals, particularly archivists, to dedicate more of their time and resources to the task of preserving hard-copy or digital family archives. Despite the fact that many archival institutions are already engaged in acquiring and preserving personal records, Cox asserts that the majority are focused on traditional materials that are either already part of their holdings or destined for their repositories. Few archives, he argues, have paid much attention to the traditional and digital collections assembled by families that are located in their homes or on the Web.