Archival mishaps and missing information.

I realized that I had missed some requirements for reading responses, but this has also presented me with a unique opportunity to re-read some of the earlier content in this class with experience and a higher level of context. While these readings are used to give us a basis for the course at the start, it seems that it is much easier to understand the readings when combined with personal experience.  Samantha Thompson’s article on archival digitalization stood out to me because of recent events regarding our case.

I had been in contact with the board of education in St. Mary’s County. While the digitized records dating as far back as 2009, that is where they stopped. I asked for them to search in the 1998 records to find the formal complaint that was issued regarding Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I was informed by Kathryn Mancini, Administrative Assistant to the Board of Education of St. Mary’s County Public Schools that, “We do not maintain Board of Education meeting notes from 1998 in electronic form.  I did review the archived paper copies from that year.  There is no reference to any parent complaint regarding Song of Solomon.” This is a significant piece for our website that we may be unable to obtain.

Samantha Thompson’s article deals more with archivist, but in a way, whoever digitized the county’s records was acting as an archivist for them. As Samantha points out,

“archivists commonly digitize records to facilitate access.”

I do not know if the 1998 complaints against Song of Solomon have been deliberately withheld or if it was a matter of dealing with volume. The records that are available on the website are extensive and do not seem to omit any details. Maintaining meetings for years on end and scanning them in must have been an exhausting process and a start point was probably decided on with consideration to relevance of material.

 

Samantha Thompson’s article also prompted me to reflect on my previous visits to local archives. Our schools own archives have been extensively digitized, but we pay a full-time archivist to work on this. The local Leonardtown archives have not begun any sort of digitization and that may have to deal with the volunteer status of tis employees. Most of them are retirees giving back their time and they may not understand the new technologies involved with complex digitization.

I was pleased to see that Samantha Thompson brought up data degradation. On a surface level documents would be safer in a digital format and not subject to flooding, fire, or vandalism. The truth is that digital files would need similar maintenance and be subject to the same sorts of natural disaster risks. Even if data was kept off site at great costs to whoever was maintaining them, anything could happen and without the originals it would be lost forever.