Because documents arrive to us from all sorts of different places, some of them not necessarily
particularly clean, they need to be assessed for contamination. Contamination could be
just dirt and dust or it could be paper eating bugs which we have to be careful not to introduce
into our wider holdings. Already the profession has people who specialise in digital medium
and specialise in different areas of the profession. You have people who specialise in photographic
archives, in film archives, in paper archives and I think increasingly a growing sector
within the service is going to be people who specialise in digital medium. My job is
to repair all the documents which are too damaged to handle.
Something that all archive services are noticing is that with digital medium there is more
material that is being deposited, more is being created and less is being deleted or
discarded. So the job of actually searching through the material that is deposited and
finding what is important and what is worthy of permanent preservation and what isn't
is becoming ever more difficult because of the nature of the volume of the material.
The preference that people have for using print or archival material, actual documents
as opposed to using digital versions over the web or via their laptop or iPad or whatever
that tends to be a personal thing, what we are finding in our context in the university
library is that the younger generation coming in now, students over the last two, three,
four, five years, they are actually familiar with digital resources much more than print
and archival resources. So they find it more difficult in a sense to adjust to having to
use printed documents or archival documents as opposed to having stuff on their desktop
at their fingertips.
After the documents have been to conservation and they've been conserved, that's when they
come into here which is when they are catalogued. And archivists or archivists will look through
collection documents and will write a description of what those documents are.
In the future things are going to be virtually deposited with us, born digital media and
that is going to present a whole post of new problems for the archive profession as a whole.
Because we've been collecting and preserving paper medium for hundreds of years now, the
knowledge base is built up, we have a great amount of expertise, it's very tried and tested
with regard to born digital medium, it's a completely new intellectual space and it's
something that the profession is still grappling with.
So we're going through not just the digital revolution where masses of material are being
made available over the web, we're actually going through a digitisation revolution where
we don't know what the answer is to conserving all of this huge amount of material which
we're digitising. That's a big question for the future and it's going to involve a lot
of people's time and a lot of money to come up with the answer to that.
