How soon is now? Writings on digital archiving in Canada from the 1980s to 2011

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, electronic records were a source of general concern and debate among Canadian archivists. There was a heightened interest in, and increasing numbers of articles about, electronic recordkeeping projects such as the University of British Columbia (UBC) Project and the National Archives of Canada's Information Management and Office Systems Advancement (IMOSA) Project, as well as non-Canadian projects like the Pittsburgh Project. Such projects often represented a turning away from approaches established and expertise gained during the machine readable archives (MRA) era. Nonetheless, digital archival work outside of these projects continued, much of it moving in trajectories set during the MRA era. This article suggests that MRA methods, ideas, and approaches have reemerged today as foundational to contemporary digital archives theory and practice.