History in the Trash?
Meet Jeremy John, the first curator of digital manuscripts, at the British Library.

Like Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, love-letters between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and John Lennon’s scrawled first draft of “Ticket to Ride”, these superannuated machines, and the equally venerable computer files boxed next to them, are now part of the world’s greatest library collection. Digital texts – whether e-mails, research projects or literary drafts – are easy to create and even easier to discard. But as John, the library’s first curator of digital manuscripts, is aware, they constitute an increasingly large part of our cultural record – treasures which, if not properly archived, could soon be lost to future generations.

Source: Financial Times

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 and is filed under Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Digitization Projects, Info Management and Retrieval, Libraries and Librarianship, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.