You are warmly invited to attend a free public lecture at UCL on Wednesday 25 September 2013 at 17.45 for 18.00 in UCL Darwin Building B40 Lecture Theatre. We are delighted to welcome our speaker, Professor Paul Conway, Associate Professor, University of Michigan School of Information and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Kings College, University of London who will talk about ‘Traces and Transformations: A Case for the Archival Nature of Digital Surrogates’.

 

Large-scale digitization is generating extraordinary collections of visual and textual surrogates, potentially endowed with transcendent long-term cultural and research values. Understanding the nature of digital surrogacy is a substantial intellectual opportunity for archival science and the digital humanities. The paper presents an argument that one of the most significant requirements for the long-term access to collections of digital surrogates is to treat digital surrogates as archives in their own right, worthy of preservation as archives. It advances a theory of the archival nature of surrogacy founded on longstanding notions of archival quality, the traces of their source and the conditions of their creation, and the functional “work of the archive.” The paper presents evidence supporting a post-custodial “secondary provenance” derived from re-digitization, re-ingestion of multiple versions, and de facto replacement of the original sources. The design of the underlying research that motivates the paper and summary findings are reported separately. The project has been supported generously by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

 

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in Foster Court, Arts and Humanities Common Room. The maps at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps/ show you the building locations. Darwin Building is accessible from within the campus, via Torrington Place.

No booking is necessary. Further details are given at : http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/icarus/culture/JenkinsonLecture

 

 

Dr Elizabeth Shepherd

 

Professor, Archives and Records Management

Director of Research

Department of Information Studies

University College London

Gower Street

London WC1E 6BT

tel + 44 020 7679 2945

fax + 44 020 7383 0557

 

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/elizabeth-shepherd/