Report Brings Archival Perspective to Problems in Managing Digital Information

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has published Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment, by Anne J. Gilliland-Swetland. This report examines how the archival perspective can be useful in addressing problems faced by those who design, manage, disseminate, and preserve digital information. The author notes that because archives focus on records, archivists are keenly aware of how societal, institutional, and individual memory is constructed, and the implications of how that memory is represented and transmitted over time. This is especially important as more of the world's collections are reformatted and represented online, where information is subject not only to corruption or outright loss, but also to loss of context. The archival community has been active in exploiting the roles of context and hierarchy in information retrieval. This report is $15 prepaid. To order, contact CLIR at info@clir.org or visit www.clir.org.