From Casual History to Digital Preservation 
Ari Davidow, Jewish Women's Archive, USA
http://katrina.jwa.org
Traditional history relies on the ability to review hundreds or thousands of relevant documents and artifacts. Using Web 2.0 tools, an archive can now gather those objects on-line, creating an historical record broader and deeper than ever before possible. In conceiving its "Katrina's Jewish Voices" project in late 2005, the Jewish Women's Archive realized that it was not enough to create a "raw archive" of such objects. For digital preservation we require assurances of fixity, as well as the capture of significant metadata about objects, their contributors and creators (where possible), and about the relationships between complex objects. In this project, we made good progress towards these goals and made a major step forward in our goal of becoming and exemplifying the "Archive for the 21st century."
Session: Content Management [Design]
Keywords: digital preservation, on-line collecting, archival metadata, fixity, raw archive
