The Gap between Personal vs Institutional Digital Archives of Researchers

Au Yeung, Timothy Chung Yin (2010)
The Gap between Personal vs Institutional Digital Archives of Researchers. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, December.

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Abstract

Preservation of a researcher's digital material is a challenging problem for cultural heritage institutions mandated with archiving such materials. Archivists and curators have to do a significant amount of work to organize and describe the material. Archivists also have to act quickly on new material, as it is time-sensitive due to technological obsolescence and the inherent instability of its evolving software environment. One possibility is to have the institution incorporate digital materials created, maintained and archived by researchers via their personal websites. The problem is that personal websites are quite different from institutional archives. In this thesis, I explore these differences. I investigate researcher websites as a potential digital personal archive that could assist archivists in preserving the researcher's work. I survey websites of senior researchers within the domain of Human-Computer Interaction to see what they are currently creating. I interview researchers to understand their motivation. The results articulate the mismatch between the needs of archivists and the goals of researchers. From the results I derive a set of design guidelines for building digital archiving systems that could bring researchers and archivists closer together.

Bibtex entry

@MASTERSTHESIS { 2010-AuYeung.MScThesis,
CLASS = { THESIS },
AUTHOR = { Au Yeung, Timothy Chung Yin },
TITLE = { The Gap between Personal vs Institutional Digital Archives of Researchers },
SCHOOL = { Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary },
ADDRESS = { Calgary, Alberta, Canada },
YEAR = { 2010 },
MONTH = { December },
}