Report: “Librarians Grapple With Diverse Archiving in a Digital World”

From an Inside Higher Ed article by Lauren Coffey:

The need to streamline digital archiving has been a creeping concern for university librarians for years. It’s a task made even more daunting by the need to ensure diversity and equity and the ongoing discovery of gaps in archives that leave many stories untold.

“We’re really having to stop our denial,” said Nadia Ghasedi, associate university librarian for the special collections, preservation, and digital strategies division at Washington University.

“There’s been years where a collection has come in a paper form and some hard drives,” she said. “We process the paper because that’s what we’re comfortable with and the other stuff sits there, where, ‘It’s a problem for tomorrow.’ And tomorrow is here.”

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Gaps in university archives are not uncommon. At North Carolina State University, Virginia Ferris highlights holes in the university’s own collection as a way to show students the importance of archiving.

“We’re showing students, ‘Here’s the history in our community on campus,’ and inviting them to think about whose voices are here and whose are not, what the silence tells us and why those records didn’t make it,” said Ferris, the lead librarian for outreach and engagement in the Special Collections Research Center.

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“Librarians have been very active since the beginning of the internet, developing preservation standards for materials and how to migrate them to keep their fidelity,” said Judy Ruttenberg, senior director of scholarship and policy at the Association of Research Libraries. “With respect to [ensuring] diversity, that’s also the job of librarians—to serve the entire community.”

Learn More, Read the Complete Article (about 1300 words)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Archives and Special Collections, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Preservation