Friday, October 28, 2005

NYLA: Born Digital (presentation slides, etc.)

This morning I did my presentation entitled Born Digital. The PowerPoint is available on my web site. There were approx. 57 people in the room with most of them being either academic or public librarians. The presentation went well, but of course there were things that should have been said or said differently:
  • I did not talk about those electronic records that institutions create (e.g., personnel files, business documents). Although a library might not collect them to "serve" to the public, the library might be involved in create policies for their collection and maintenance as part of the institution's record management.
  • I used the phrase "card catalogue" and, as soon as the words left my lips, I knew it was very "old school." Unfortunately, I did file cards in a real card catalogue back in the 1970s and I still correlate OPACs and library management systems to those old catalogues. I need, however, to banish that phrase from my mind. (And, yes, a person -- slightly younger than me -- reminded me privately afterwards that there are people who can't relate to those old terms.)
  • Otherwise, my terminology was good and understandable, although I used the word "wiki" which at least one person didn't know what it was.
  • I should have talked about collaborating on creating born digital collections. Even in small institutions, collaborative efforts could make the finding and ingestion of born digital materials much easier. For example, collaborate with those departments that create most of the born digital materials that you want to collect in order to ensure that the materials come to the library (repository).

The material flowed well, which always concerned me. I slipped in some humor and good examples (including one from Stargate: SG-1). And the questions/comments were all good. Hopefully people will download the presentation itself and especially look at the four resources listed at the end.




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