The merits of paper vs electronic; paper lives on, even for "generation digital"

Paper continues to be very important for many organizations, often coexisting with electronic records and sometimes in preference to it. At times, this reaches irrational extremes. Some people I have worked with insist on printing information from computers (e.g. emails, database search results) that simply strike me as a waste of paper (Just read it on the monitor! Save paper!). However, I enjoy writing and sending traditional letters; I like that it takes more effort than email, how it is a physical object that one sends and so forth. As much as I wish more of my friends and family would correspond properly, I can appreciate that this is very much viewed as a dying art.

Normally, in any kind of professional context, I function with a presumption in favour of email. Today's example involves the final project of my History MA. The department requires email and paper copies, fair enough. A friend of mine, however, only wants to submit paper copies. He is worried (indeed, convinced of the fact) that electronic submission may result in some kind of fraud. It is true that it is easier to copy electronic text rather than paper. But this concern strikes me as overrated; while interesting, I don't think anybody would steal my work. But I digress. To argue in favour of this pro-paper view, he vaguely asserted that it was common business practice to still only use paper. The reasoning for this is security - alternations to paper are more difficult than to paper. There may also be certain legal reasons for this - a handwritten signature is generally accorded more weight than an "electronic signature" that is little more than a password.

Aside from letters and other such personal items, I generally think email and electronic documents are the best way to go. I wonder how long this hybrid situation will last though. Is the conservatism of the legal profession really the driving force here? Will archivists succeed in persuading email users to keep files properly? We will see.

Web 2.0 for Archives: Archival Wiki and Archives Carnival

I have been thinking lately that archivists (and probably users of archives as well) would benefit a great deal from embracing some of the Internet technologies often classified as "Web 2.0." Web 2.0 is something of a buzzword, but it does point to recent interesting Internet developments such as the rise of social networking websites (Facebook and MySpace; the potential of these remains largely unexplored in my view) and collaborative projects. Probably the best example of Internet collaboration so far is the famous Wikipedia (now has 1.8 million articles in English)

More specifically, I wonder about developing a Wiki for archives and archival uses, that registered users (perhaps limit membership to members of a professional association or have them host it?) could modify and update. In terms of content, this could go a number of ways. Some examples do come to mind. Recently, at SRA, we discovered the meaning of a term (MIP) that was some sort of Latin abbreviation for "woman with no children." As one can imagine, this sort of information is useful when answering family history questions. All kinds of other things could go into an archival wiki; preservation advice, experiments with digitization, and so forth... In fact, there may well be such a Wiki out on the Internet, but I have not been able to find it.

The other idea that I would like to see happen would be an archives carnival. I am most familiar with teaching carnivals and history carnivals, but there is no reason why it could not also be done with archival blogs. If you have are not familiar with this kinds of websites, they are aggregators of blog posts. Often, there is a commentary and a theme linking together a month's blog posts, which I have found to be quite interesting. Compared to university professors though, there are far fewer archival blogs out there, but hopefully this will change with time.

I don't know how many people are reading this, but I certainly invite comments and discussion about how archives might use these technologies. Has anybody out there already experimented with them?