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Deleted tweet by Donald Trump during the Alabama Republican primary. Preserved by ProPublica.

When President Donald Trump issues a tweet, the whole world takes notice. It’s no surprise then that equal attention is paid when he deletes one. While the social media posts of Canadian politicians and government institutions may not garner quite the same attention, concerns are being raised nonetheless about how often similar deletions are occurring north of the 49th parallel.

Several times this year, Conservative MPs have asked questions in the House of Commons about how often government entities (including departments, agencies, and crown corporations) delete social media posts and what reasons they have for doing so. In November, the government tabled a report1 aimed at addressing the issue.

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When we think of archives in the modern day, we think of digital records and digital record-keeping. We have moved from using paper, to digitizing it, to more recently, creating records digitally (or what is called born-digital records).

In this post, I focus on mass digitization and choose to point out the issues faced by organizations when doing so. The starting point for my topic is an article, entitled “Access and Preservation in Mass Digitization Projects.”, by John Yolkowski and Krista Jamieson.

In the article, the authors discuss a mass digitization project at Dalhousie University. The university was given a certain amount of money by a donor to digitize a fonds. The project had to be complete within a year’s time.

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Do you know who Kona @konathekelpie is? What about Sammo Hog @sammohog? These two Instagram personalities are animals. They are animals who have been imbued with a type of agency and existence in the world beyond their affiliation with their owners.

Stopping to think about the ramifications of that is powerful. That means, in time, as a society, we may have archival documents about the lives and predilections of pets.

The medium and ability by which we record the present may have changed from tablets to papyrus, paper to electronic from single hierarchy to poly, but what remains the same is our need to record today to remember what we need. What remains the same is our memory of today is transmitted to the future where we are remembered by our descendants. Kona is a dog who likes belly rubs, and Sammo is a power pig. In the future we may remember them by the records they left about themselves.

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Souce: iStock

Whether we like it or not, the age of big data is upon us. Since 2012, it is estimated that data collection has been growing at a rate of 50% per year, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

This is a problem for records managers. As is, there are nearly too many records to realistically deal with. If something is not done, soon records managers will find themselves overwhelmed and overworked.

We shouldn’t despair though, because there are many options being explored to solve this crisis. Some of these methods include fuzzy sets logic, deep learning, and machine learning. All of these are different forms of artificial intelligence, and each helps automate a different process. The only problem is, it’s not records managers who are doing the exploring. Nearly all the progress and discussion in this field is being made by software engineers and computer scientists.

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