Building Relationships: "A Foundation for Digital Archives"

Building Relationships: "A Foundation for Digital Archives"

Archives

This article asks if it is worth the time and resources to collaborate with other digital archives. It explores six digital archives that were funded through the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program to collaborate with each other. Building relationships amongst archivists is time-consuming. The most important factor in these relationships is trust. However, the experience shows that the benefits of collaboration far outweigh the costs. Collaboration allows professionals to work from a common knowledge base. It creates better relationships with data providers and software developers. And it allows for networked collections with common standards. Similarly, often, digital archives have certain strengths and weaknesses that complement each other. Working together allows digital archives to accomplish much more than if they were working alone. For these reasons, the authors argue that collaboration is essential to any digital archiving project.

Crabtree, Jonathan

Donakowski, Darrell

Polk, Victoria

Journal Article

http://www.ils.unc.edu/tibbo/JCDL2006/Crabtree-JCDLWorkshop2006.pdf

Crabtree, Jonathan and Darrell Donakowski. “Building Relationships: ‘A Foundation for Digital Archives.’” Accessed on February 6, 2012. http://www.ils.unc.edu/tibbo/JCDL2006/Crabtree-JCDLWorkshop2006.pdf.