In the last part of Erinna Cave’s EMF talk ¹ Are archivists pointless when the cloud can just save everything? - EMF2024 [ YouTube link ], she talks about Archival appraisal and it seemed interesting to apply the process to protocols, but I couldn’t find any interesting insights on my own. I did a quick search on the forum and found nothing, so I thought posting it as a question could be a good idea.
From the video (22:54), in case it inspires someone:
There’s a couple of ideas from the archiving world (…);
- A use-based approach: what is this record used for? what may it be used for in the future? so we talk about primary usages and secondary usages. Good example is a will its primary use was legal and then its secondary use will be family historians in the future.
- Second approach (…) a risk-based assessment: what is the risk if I destroy these records? what level of risk am I comfortable accepting? what’s the likelihood of that risk? how do I prioritize it?
- A third more wild idea (…) we could have digital expiry dates built into software so when you save a record, you’re asked for how long you want to save it for, and then you have a warning come up: “you have records about to expire, would you like to review them?” and that sort of forces us to confront the problem in a
way that piles of paper used to.
The question feels a bit to weak for the protocol-hilbert tag, but maybe there is a way to reformulate it in a more fundamental way.
¹ Via Progress is easy to miss – The lost outpost (Andy Piper)