INF 389G Introduction to Electronic and Digital Records, Unique 27349 - Fall 2019--homepage | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Instructor: Dr. Patricia K. Galloway Course Meeting TimeThursdays 12:00 p.m - 3:00 p.m, UTA 1.210A Course Description Yet since both governments and other human institutions and individuals have depended upon technologies of memory in the past, it is a safe bet that they will continue to do so in at least the immediate future (as, for example, Hillary Clinton's email server or President Trump's tweets). For that reason these problems must and will be solved, at least in terms of a sequence of temporary solutions that will be good enough to achieve the ends of the institutions in question and of individuals for their everyday lives, both by those who are charged with the institutional custody and preservation of the cultural record and by individuals themselves. The problems are not just technological; if that were so they could (and perhaps would) already have been solved. They are, more importantly, social, economic, and political. The archivist or records manager or digital librarian or individual called upon to solve them in a real-world setting will have to understand not just a set of ideal archival requirements, but how to cope with applying them to and tailoring them for an actual functional environment--bearing in mind that in the current digital environment change never ceases, the people who create and use the records have other things to think about, the powers that be continue to think of the problem as the job of IT, and getting it right once and for all is not an option. Individuals can hopefully borrow from these institutional practices the solutions that suit them--or they may devise novel solutions for themselves. Increasingly, it seems that individual practices are having significant impact on what people can be persuaded to do in the way of digital recordkeeping in the workplace (especially where BYOD is becoming common), so personal digital archives has become an important area of research. In this introductory course, we will: 1) become acquainted with the basic literature on digital records and recordkeeping (and contest the term "records") 2) track new developments in the field over the semester in order to get a feel for how to pay attention to emergent problems 3) apply our learning to coming up with a business case for a real-world problem 4) and examine reflexively our own digital recordkeeping practices over our lifetimes and at present as a sample of the kinds of problems existing in the broader environment. Documented Disability Statement Religious Holy Days Professor: Dr. Patricia K. Galloway
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