Toward a Notion of the Archive of

the FutureAn Article Review by Susan Scott

Article Reviewed

• Toward a Notion of the Archive of the Future: Impressions of Practice by Librarians, Archivists, and Digital Humanities Scholars.

• Authors: Tanya Clement, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Jennie Levine Knies.

• Published: The Library Quarterly, April 2013.

Authors’ Credentials

• Tanya Clement is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas.

• Wendy Hagenmaier is the Digital Collections Archivists at the Georgia Institute of Technology library.

• Jennie Levine Knies is the manager of digital stewardship at the University of Maryland library.

Goal of the Article

• Examine the ways in which archivists can adapt to changes in technology to better serve their patrons.

• The authors interview five archivists to discover what changes LIS professionals themselves believe are necessary to keep up with the demands of archive users

Authors’ Solutions

• Greater cooperation among archives to create large, multi-institution, multi-discipline digital collections accessible to researchers from a wide variety of fields of study.

• Use stable technology that does not become quickly outdated to create and store these collections.

Review: Positives

• Discusses important topic: how archives continue to transition into the digital age.

• Interviewing archivists and getting their perspective of what changes needs to be made is the best way to determine how to use technology to best serve archives’ patrons.

• Important for archivists and LIS students to learn how to create digital collections to generate greater access of their resources.

Review: Negatives

• The creation of multi-institution, multi-discipline digital collections is an excellent idea, but the authors do not present an argument of how to do so.

• More information in one single collection may make it more difficult for users to find the material they need.

Conclusion

• The article brings forward an important subject: how archives continue to keep the balance between housing physical resources and creating digital resources.

• Digital technology is now a fact of life that current and future archivists must both adapt to and learn how to use to fulfill their obligations to archive users.

• Because technology is the preferred means of gathering information for most of the general public, archivists must offer their materials in a digital format.