Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Appraisal and disposal > Practical solutions advocated by the Paradigm Project
Practical solutions advocated by the Paradigm Project
Practical tests
Photographs
The popularity of the digital camera has vastly increased the number of photographs found in the average computer directory and on mobile devices and web services. The ease with which images can be taken and the fact that images can be captured and discarded at minimal cost has encouraged their exponential growth. Archivists familiar with cataloguing paper photographs will know how difficult it is to identify individuals correctly and to deduce the date, place and occasion of a photograph unless such descriptive data has been recorded on the reverse of the image. The same is true of digital images unless meaningful metadata has been recorded at the time of capture or storage. Most individuals do not record in detail the 'who, why, when and where' when taking a digital photograph as the image has been taken for their own use and they are likely to know this information. Digital cameras automatically generate a limited amount of metadata such as: dimensions, date, camera model, type/format, size, but the standards used to record this metadata (and the metadata contained in those standards) vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and will need to be converted to a standard descriptive and technical metadata schema. Such technical information will be vital for the technical aspects of digital preservation but has limited use for descriptive cataloguing purposes.
Appraising photographs found in Paradigm accessions
One sample accession included a series of images recording a dilapidated building in Manchester. The folder was named, rather unhelpfully, 'Manchester building' and held six untitled images, aside from the automatically generated date there is little else to go on. This was a classic example of the problems associated with appraising digital photographic collections and later creating meaningful descriptive metadata for images.
Paradigm found that file directories often contained many images taken of the same composition to maximise the chance of a good shot. Where numerous images of essentially the same shot exist, there are grounds for selecting the most representative and disposing of the rest.
Another more useful example from one collection is a folder holding an image and a related press release. The transfer process obliterated the date the image was taken but it is likely to have been taken around the date of the press release, 11 July 2003. The image showed an alarmed politician wearing a target and undergoing a mock execution by a masked man wearing khaki. Without the accompanying press release, a cataloguer may have been at a loss to explain what the image documented. From the press release it becomes obvious that it was a publicity stunt in which the politician along with 12 trade union general secretaries, and a former minister were 'mock' assassinated outside Parliament for protesting against the UK Government's continued military assistance to Colombia - not something your average archivist could have guessed!
Many images will have originally arrived attached to an email. The 'carrier' email is likely to contain some descriptive metadata relating to the image. It may be possible to find the date when the image file was transferred and search for all incoming email for that date. Such a search might generate additional contextual information. Conversely it is likely that some images will only exist as attachments and will not have been saved and stored elsewhere in the computer directory. Again much will depend on the record keeping practices of the individual creator.
One clear advantage of working with contemporary politicians, and dealing with material likely to be less than 5 or 6 years old, is that it is possible to ask the creators of the photographs to provide missing contextual information. For some creators, this might mean working through the photographs image by image; others may only have the time to assign a date or an occasion at a group level.
Appraising an email directory
Paradigm found that the way in which an archivist could approach the appraisal of an email directory was very much dependent of the way in which the directory had been structured by its creator. Some depositors arranged emails into logical folders and others did not. For structured directories a folder-by-folder appraisal can be undertaken; this approach takes the title of folders into consideration and perhaps examines some sample emails within. The appraisal of email directories with very little structure is a far more daunting task. It is impossible to read each email and judge its worth on an email-by-email basis, though sorting and searching techniques might allow the archivist to delete, or be sure to keep emails from certain individuals and organisations, or concerning a certain subject. In such circumstances it may be best to preserve the entire email directory, subject to depositor restrictions, without undertaking any appraisal. In this scenario, the future researcher would be reliant on the search and sort facilities of access mechanisms to make productive use of the email archive.
Another question that may arise when appraising email concerns the retention of spam email in an individual's personal archive. There may be a case, for some institutions at least, to collect electronic ephemera, such as spam, as historians of the future might find it to be of great interest in the same way as scholars have found a wealth of information on quack doctors and pseudo-scientific remedies from the small advertisements in the popular press of Victorian times.
Paradigm found that there were some ethical questions to address in the appraisal of email too. These included the retention of deleted email found in depositors inboxes: creators did not necessarily realise that an email archive would include these emails. For email archives where select folders are to be given, there is also the question of sentmail, which is typically not arranged to mirror any directory structure in place for incoming mail and may include email relevant to incoming email not accessioned as part of the email archive. Ideally the archivist should ask the depositor whether such emails should be retained as part of the archive.
