Comments on: Free report on storage environment (your tax dollars at work)

By: Sally J.

Sally J. — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 01:51:00 +0000

FP, are you attending ACA? Keep me posted.

By: French Panic

French Panic — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:41:00 +0000

The conference theme next year for the Association of Canadian Archivists is all about digitization, etc. I’m sure there will be lots of debate on it – all of the listservs I am on are full of people yapping about it, but solutions and strategies….?

By: Sally J.

Sally J. — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:51:00 +0000

French, Thanks for commenting. Loved the part about backing away slowly, heh.

A big question for our profession is this: How do we get the word out that digital is not a money saver?

By: French

French — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:31:00 +0000

Yesssssssssss. Of course your advice is still valid. This is one of those problems that people outside of the library and archives world just cannot seem to wrap their heads around.

As the sole archivist in my office, I cannot keep up with the backlog in dealing with paper accessions, let alone the digitization projects that are barely started, and I have to check myself before laughing hysterically at the poor fools who honestly believe that scanning everything in the collection will make my job easier. When I start pointing out to them that I will need new machines, an actual staff to implement all of this, and things like a “scanner” (the archives department is deemed not worthy enough to have a scanner; I have to use someone else’s in the office whenever I receive a request for a scanned document)…. then they start to back away, as I continue to foam at the mouth and gesticulate wildly.