Wrapping up

In the past 5 and a half years at McGill, I have certainly accumulated a vast amount of notes, paperwork, folders, files, not to mention megabytes upon megabytes of electronic files (Word docs, HTML files, PDF, Photoshop PSD, etc, etc).

And now it's time to put some final order to them all.

Most of the paperwork--my hand-written notes, web page printouts, article printouts, draft and final reports--relate to digitalpermanence, McGill's e-records management and preservation initiative. In flipping the folders and countless pages, I believe that we--the University Archives--covered a lot of territory, most of which was the 'great unknown' to us all at the time.

A quick glance at my folders reveal the areas covered:

• Email management (best practices)
  
• Email conversion to long-term file format (tests with sample inboxes)
  
• Electronic records transfer and access protocols (report)
  
• Enterprise-wide digital imaging (scanning) standards (report)
  
• Web archiving snapshot tool (application developed)
  
• Courseware information management and preservation (research)
  
• Institutional repositories information management and preservation (research)
  
• Strategies in digital preservation (research)

Besides this, there is the University Archives website I designed and maintained, plus virtual exhibits and web content I created over the years. They'll need some documentation, I suspect.

Back to the wrap up...

"Let's Go Exploring!"

Dear Readers:

A special welcome to those arriving here at The DIGITAL Archive for the first time and a warm welcome back to my casual/constant readers. This will be a short but important posting, one that will affect the future of The DIGITAL Archive.

After 5 and a half years working in the McGill University Archives, including 2 years working on digitalpermanence (the McGill University Archives' electronic records management and preservation project), I have decided to move on and explore other avenues.

While this marks the end of my time at McGill University (and marks the beginning of a hopefully short unemployment period and a major job search), the future of this blog is not in jeopardy.

It's amazing how this curiously named medium--blog--has given me a new perspective on technology and information, and on the evolution of sharing knowledge and exchanging ideas. It's amazing how bloggers that blog about libraries and archives and digitization and digital projects (and you know who you are) have broadened my horizon.

In a way, thanks in part to their enthusiasm and their daily commitment to post news and observations about the world of digital information, these dedicated bloggers helped me make the decision to move onward.

The decision to leave one's job is never easy, particular when the experience was positive. But sometimes the gut feelings and flashing lights are too strong and persistent to ignore, and the courage to make a tough decision surfaces and propels you forward. By chance, I even bumped into a few blogs about just that, here and here.

"OK, so what about The DIGITAL Archive?" you ask.

The DIGITAL Archive--in name, in URL, in design--will remain as such for now. But I will omit its affiliation to McGill University (actually, it was always ad-hoc and unofficial to begin with). Should readers wish to learn more about the McGill University Archives' digitalpermanence project, I encourage them to visit the University Archives' website.

The content of The DIGITAL Archive will change, however. One thing I've noticed about blogging is that content evolves as the writer begins to grow more confident, more focused, on his or her topic of choice. I would like to track interesting news stories that involve digitization projects, institutional and governmental digitization initiatives, digital preservation, the evolution of the Web, the dissemination of online information, RSS, podcasting, the future of archives and libraries, plus a few personal commentaries and observations, if I can squeeze those in as well.

Consider this blog as my connection to world of digitization. I'll use it to stay current as I embark on my job search into--surprise, surprise--the world of digitization.

I promised to make this posting short, but looks like I blew it.

In ending this chapter of this blog, I am reminded of the final instalment of the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip, in which Calvin, the boy with a gifted imagination that transforms his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, into a real but friendly tiger with a quick wit, steps outside with his sidekick into a world covered by freshly-fallen snow and exclaims, with toboggan in hand: "Let's go exploring!"

Technical Glitches

In reading The DIGITAL Archive, you may notice that the paragraph formatting has gone haywire.

I was tweaking settings over the weekend (and I suspect I fooled around with things I should not have) and there we go. No more paragraphs, just blocks of text.

Hang in there as we fix this technical difficulty.

Article: The End of the Internet?

Is the Internet as we know (and love) about to come to an end?

The Nation has an eye-opening article.

And just when I was getting used to this Internet thing...

Report: Digital Curation and Preservation

A document on digital preservation and strategies for the next decade.

It's a PDF document.