The Information Specialist's Scoop

RT @tadawes: For Archivists, ‘Occupy’ Movement Presents New Challenges - Wired Campus - http://t.co/iKpx3Hmg...

 

By Jeffrey R. Young:

"Howard Besser, a New York University archivist, recently got into a shouting match at an Occupy protest, making a case for why the activists should preserve records of their activities.“Within the Occupy movement there’s a huge suspicion of traditional organizations, including libraries and universities,” Mr. Besser explained Monday at the spring meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information.

The shouting match was an extreme moment, but Mr. Besser and other archivists on a panel here explained that they have had to take unusual steps to try to gather a snapshot for future scholars of the nationwide Occupy protests, which call attention to income inequality in the United States. Those steps—including distributing postcards promoting archiving at protests, developing automated systems to download photos posted online, and asking participants to vote on which images are most important for the historic record—could serve as a model for preserving future events."

Via Karen du Toit