Assignment 5

Pete Williams et al. survey challenges technological innovation presents in archiving personal collections at the British Library in "Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections." The article can be found at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/williams-et-al/. Challenges identified by Williams include the issue of how do digital collection managers identify and collect digital information content in a variety of formats and diverse locations. Digital content in personal collections includes documents, articles, digital images, audio recordings, web pages, blogs, and email. The content of blogs and web-based email present particular challenges, because such content is physically located on hosting servers, rather than on the content creators' personal computers.

Initially I had thought to base this assignment on a collection of digitized photographs. As such, the collection would have been an extension of the content I used in the IRLS 672 term project. However, I think the issues raised by Williams are intriguing. I would like to base this assignment using the Drupal content management system on a diverse collection of personal documents I have created in a range of activities over the years. Working with such a collection would be interesting to me because I am not readily aware of how such a collection will be described and organized, and because the variety of object formats might present interesting problems. I am particularly interested to see to what degree I can link disparate objects of the collection.

The digital objects include MS Word documents, PDF documents, image files, emails, and blogs. I think it will be especially interesting to see if I can integrate the emails into the collection, because the emails have a stack of files associated with them. The documents include a variety of subject matter, including professional activities, travel plans, maps, business transactions, and hobbies.

I think the question of who might access this collection might have less relevance than with other collections. Since this is a personal collection, I suppose only I would access it. If this is problematic, then I can use a collection of digitized photographs instead. But if the issue of who might access the collection is a deficiency, I think this deficiency is mitigated by interesting problems of incorporating digital objects of diverse format and subject matter into an integrated collection.

The diversity of subject matter will present interesting problems in the development of a taxonomy. I hope this assignment will present an opportunity to experiment with other methods of classification, such as tagging. I am tending to agree with Clay Shirky's argument in "Ontology is Overrated," that effective classification can organically grow from a population of diverse user tags.