RICHARD J. COX, Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past few years, Richard Cox has been grappling with, and writing about, the mounting challenges of preserving digital records and web products -email, tweets, blogs, and websites -produced by the public in Records and Information Management Report and his personal blog, Reading Archives.This substantial work, Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling, attempts to consolidate all of his thoughts and findings relating to this topic, as well as the broader issue of preserving traditional personal records such as correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, home videos, and photo albums, in order to convince information professionals, particularly archivists, to dedicate more of their time and resources to the task of preserving hard-copy or digital family archives.Despite the fact that many archival institutions are already engaged in acquiring and preserving personal records, Cox asserts that the majority are focused on traditional materials that are either already part of their holdings or destined for their repositories.Few archives, he argues, have paid much attention to the traditional and digital collections assembled by families that are located in their homes or on the Web.Cox begins by describing what motivates individuals to collect family memorabilia.He emphasizes how important the act of collecting is to families, providing the custodians with insight into their ancestors and their past, and ultimately, in his words, serving as "evidence of our existence" (p.120).In turn, family records, he notes, elicit warm memories of family members, particularly those who are no longer with us, as well as memorable family trips, events, and activities.Despite their zeal for collecting, Cox states that most amateur archivists have little understanding of how to properly preserve their traditional and digital family treasures.This, he asserts, could result in a "loss of memory and identity" or in essence, a type of "social alzheimers" on the part of the families involved (p.166).While this has been an ongo-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".