Gilliland‐Swetland is a distinguished author in the archives field and an assistant professor at UCLA with a special interest in the area of electronic records and digital archives. In this paper, sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources, Gilliland‐Swetland addresses how the archival science perspective can contribute to the development of guiding principles for the design, management, preservation and use of digital resources.
The paper covers basic principles of archive management and practice, drawing on the historical development of archival practice, both European and US, up to the burgeoning electronic record‐keeping era. The author suggests that the emergence of digital record keeping as a major source of material has led the archive profession to revisit many of its accepted practices, such as retention periods, standards for description and the wider issue of document creation and preservation. She discusses issues involved in the digitisation of collections and raises the questions of when a digital copy is sufficient and when the original will be necessary, the need for migration and the perennial issue of maintaining context in this process. She then discusses some of the major international projects currently under way, including a discussion of various metadata standards and the implementation of EAD (Encoded Archival Description) in the USA. Other projects include the UK Cedars Project, which includes coverage of rights management as well as description, and the Digital Repository Project in The Netherlands concerned with the development of emulation software to assist in the migration of data while retaining its original look and feel.
In this brief work, Gilliland‐Swetland provides a fine overview of the development of archival principles and practices and goes on to address how these will have to evolve and, in certain cases, reinvent themselves to cope with the digital age. She does this in a scholarly and thoughtful manner, ending with a call for more cooperation across the diverse library and archive communities to pool resources in their efforts in these areas and, in particular, to develop a more interdisciplinary education programme within the library and information science curriculum. The paper ends with an extensive bibliography.
The breadth and depth of this paper make it an extremely useful resource for any graduate student interested in the area. For academics it provides a good overview and presents some challenges for their teaching and research in this increasingly fluid area. For the practitioner it provides a summary of current activity and, with its bibliography, a good resource for further research. This is not a light read, but it is well worth the effort.
