Digitising our memory

For those that are not that aware of my life outside politics, I work as the Head of Public Affairs for the National Council on Archives, an NGO funded by The National Archives and MLA to promote the archives sector to government, the public and to develop the capacity of the sector to deliver better standards in public services.


Some of the most interesting bits of my job (apart from setting up and running the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Archives) involve finding out about areas of public policy and developments in practice that I was not aware of before. One big area of development in policy and practice is digitisation. This falls within two major bits - the archiving of paper-based records and the archiving of born-digital record. A third over-arching theme is the issue of digital continuity - the preservation of these digital records for use in the future.


I was invited to write an article for the Museums & Heritage Magazine on "archiving in a digital world" and here is the result....