Digital Media Collections: Archivists Need To “Take Control” Back From IT

Joshua Ranger writing on the AudioVisual Preservation Solutions blog discusses how “Digital Media Collections Are an IT Problem But Not an IT Solution”.  The essence of Joshua’s post is that while archivists must collaborate with IT professionals to enable digital collections to be established, it is the archivists who should have primary control over core elements such as the development of metadata models and choice of formats based on the long-term preservation objectives of the organisation.

“Integration and collaboration between departments is an essential component of organizational success today -– sharing resources, eliminating redundancy, and open communication help prevent the waste and lack of innovation that can doom an organization to irrelevancy and worse. However, the people who should be in control of setting policies for file management and for selection and implementation of asset management tools — the archivists and records managers out there — have ceded too much ground to a pure IT mindset.” [Read More]

 

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