Artificial Fibers—The Implications of the Digital for Archival Access

Abstract

This article explores how current methods and approaches in archives are under serious challenge because of the changes brought about by the move to the digital. The availability of digital records has meant that new needs and new possibilities have opened up for users, including new ways of reading. The nature of archives themselves are changing-they are moving from being collections of individual texts to be pored over to data to be made sense of. New tools and techniques have emerged and are available now which offer radical new possibilities for research, but these bring new challenges about trust and the sheer volume of records to be handled. The traditional approaches of applying metadata to facilitate the finding of relevant material and of regarding digital documents as something like electronic paper is no long viable. What is needed is a new approach in which archivists and scholarly researchers see archives as collections of data which are capable of analysis by a range of sophisticated tools and which are capable of being interpreted in a range of different ways. THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW Archival practice remains locked in handicraft processes. From only a glance at the random collection of thousands of ill-assorted emails, to be found in Wiki-Leaks, it is clear that access to born digital content cannot continue to be provided through conventional catalogs. Indeed, in addressing their own collections of what the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) still call nightly telegrams, the FCO is experimenting with new sense-making tools to assist embassies interpret the streams of data they receive (Greenhalgh, 2014). These ideas and applications are successors to the initiatives to understand operational military communication messages instigated at the end of the twentieth century by the US (Grishman and Sundheim, 1996). Together with the even newer modes of digital communication such as interactive text chat (for example WhatsApp) and the increasing uses of both public and semi-private social media platforms (for example Whitehall departments' use of Twitter and the Scottish Government's tentative internal use of Yammer) means that records that the archive is already confronting are huge accumulations of "stuff." It is wishful thinking to imagine that order can be imposed on all but a fraction of content even at the time of creation. Even for "conventional" digital documents, we know, at least in the UK civil service, registries and file plans have all but vanished (Allan, 2014, 2015). The Enron emails that were made available during the legal investigations into the business consisted of 620,000 assorted emails and the only way that sense could be made of them was by using advanced computational and statistical