-
Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity.
An interview with Clifford Lynch
Stewardship in a digital age
Cliff sparked a lots of ideas and questions in me in ![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
his talk on Stewardship in the Digital Age (Oct 31, 2003 at UcBerkeley/SchoolIms. Among the topics he hits upon is DigitalPreservation -- on the institutional, national/international, and personal levels.
Cliff gave a keynote on this topic at the ECDL 2003
-
the technology we have available changes our conception of the past. If you study the "history of the past", you will see that our conception of the past has changed drastically over time.
-
Cliff gave a great illustration of how archivists and non-archivists understand digital archiving differently. Generally speaking, outsiders think of archivists as those who "save stuff", while archivists think of themselves as those who throw away the vast majority of stuff they have to preserve the roughly 3% of materials they think should be preserved.
-
As someone who has been working with digital libraries as a practitioner, I sometimes feel that I don't have sufficient theoretical grounding -- or at least some larger picture. I am looking for such grounding in reading a book like Digital Library Use : Social Practice in Design and Evaluation
-
Roy Rosenzweig's The Presence of the Past sounds like a really interesting read. The role that narratives on the personal level and small communal level are changing how we think of histories as a whole.
-
His reflections on digital stewardship on the personal level were stimulating. I've been thinking about similar issues myself but as Cliff argues, there has very little systematic, scholarly studies of the topic. Some of the issues I think of:
-
How can I ensure that my "web presence" continues on after I am able to actively maintain it? Or does my domain perish when I perish? Any commercial/non-commerical services arising to fill this niche?
-
It's interesting that the google cache has been known to save people on occasions when their own backups fail.
Other talks
ALA | LITA 2004 Closing General Session Audio Files:
-
Clifford Lynch wrapped up the LITA National Forum with a talk about preservation, personalization, education delivery and learning management systems, and consumer marketplace developments. He also tied in some topics from Forum sessions. Audio files from the talk can be found in the Related Links section of the page.
