Most archivists work, and for the foreseeable future will continue to work, in hybrid environments where analog and digital coexist and where the perception and treatment of one is informed and sometimes limited by the existence of the other. Analog collections are rendered in digital surrogates surrounded and supported by standardized digital metadata. Born-digital materials can be sorted and placed into desktop “folders” in an act that models familiar behavior with analog material and provides a comforting illusion of physicality. This presentation will look at how the mingling of analog and digital systems in the 21st-century archival institution affects, for better or worse, the perceptions and decisions of archivists working on the 20th-century paper backlog. Is the rapidly growing presence of digital systems in analog archival processing causing us to lose our (paper) minds? If so, does it matter? Lara Michels is an archivist currently working on the “quick kills” project to increase access to the paper manuscripts backlog of the Bancroft Library. She is also an historian with a PhD from Brandeis University.

1. Are we losing our
(paper) minds?
Processing analog collections in the digital world
Lara Michels
NCTPG Annual Program
23 May 2014
post-digital

3. Digital Solutionism
Digital Age
Pipes
and
Plumbing

4. Archivists in the Digital Age
Traditional Archival Paradigm
● the sanctity of evidence;
● respect des fonds,
provenance, and original
order;
● the life cycle of records;
● the organic nature of
records; and
● hierarchy in records and
their descriptions.

5. Post-Digital Age
● In the post-digital age, the digital is
commonplace and accepted, rather than
something exciting and new. --Adam
Tinworth
● The post-digital condition is a post-
apocalyptic one: the state of affairs after
the initial upheaval caused by the
computerisation and global digital networking
of communication, technical infrastructures,
markets and geopolitics.--Florian Cramer

6. We’re finally moving past the twin elephants
in the room of technological conversation.
Infatuation with everything shiny and digital,
and that nostalgic, ‘Lead Pencil Club’ clinging
to the past. We’re finally getting to the point
where we can decide which are the
appropriate technologies to use based simply
on their actual merits. And, we’re starting to
understand how to combine analog and
digital in effective ways. -- Russell Davies

8. Terry Cook
long-established, customary, time-honored,
established, classic, accustomed, standard, regular,
normal, conventional, usual, orthodox, habitual, set,
fixed, routine, ritual, old, age-old, ancestral
Paper Mind

10. Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections and the Princeton Finding Aids Project

11. In the new millenium, the media landscape is
changing far faster than our institutions, so we
now find ourselves in situations where print-
born assumptions linger and intermingle with
practices such as social media networking,
tweeting, hacking, and so on…
-- N. Katherine Hayles
The Age of Print is passing, and the
assumptions, presuppositions, and practices
associated with it are now becoming visible as
media-specific practices rather than the largely
invisible status quo. --N. Katherine Hayles
Digital Humanities

12. 2013 2012

13. Media Archaeology and Media History
Friedrich Kittler Lisa Gitelman Cornelia Vismann

14. More Media Archaeology
Erkki Huhtamo Wolfgang ErnstMichael Z. Newman

15. Lara Michels
Manuscripts Processing Archivist
Bancroft Library
lmichels@library.berkeley.edu