The Ones That Got Away

Given the forthcoming Virtualpolitik book about institutional media-making, I'm sorry to have missed a number of the sessions at the annual convention of the Society of American Archivists. Thursday’s session with Helena Zinkham on "Putting Pictures on Your Path" about the Flickr page of the Library of Congress apparently mentioned one of the phenomena that I have also written about: the presence of Internet "spoilers" who doubt the authenticity of particular images, such as this one of a car crash. For more about the project, including their internal debate about using a proprietary commercial site rather than open source software and problems with the available Creative Commons licenses, see this interview and the second part of this podcast.

I was also sorry to miss the creepy "Past Rites: Marketing for the Future" with representatives from the Archdiocese of Chicago, JPMorgan Chase Bank, Proctor and Gamble, which claims that organizations are "learning to capitalize on their heritage to enhance the perception of their integrity and performance," and that "corporations are mining histories to reinforce market presence and increase reputation and respect by forging stronger bonds with customers and employees." Managers of religious archives hosted a reception for the "Sisters of the Presentation Archives."

The most bang for the book probably would have been had at "Three Federal Digital Agencies Confront the Challenges of Digital Preservation” with James G. Cassedy, Kenneth Thibodeau, William LeFurgy, and Michael L. Wash discussing the Electronic Records Archives of the National Archives, the Federal Digital System of the Government Printing Office, and the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Project.

Note also that the Library of Congress is following the lead of other federal agencies by hosting its own official blog.