[CivicAccess-discuss] Closing of NRCan Libraries

Tue May 7 03:46:53 AEST 2013

The collections are incomplete, meaning that we are already forgotting.
The Internet did not help, as there was a presumption of permanence with
government publications on government websites until they changed the
websites and failed to archive the documents.

Curators and places for material to be, are important, as are subject
matter specialists and is access to longitudinal data which are found in
the paper notebooks of surveyors, geologists, botanists, foresters, traders
and so on.  Then there are the paper maps and the old journals which
provide clues to the present.  The lab where I work for instance is taking
a post-colonial approach to mapping and understanding of land claims and
treaties, and this requires access to archival materials.  Else, we are
just perpetuation a potentially exploitative approach.

Flexibility of imagination is to be able to refer to some facts and not
reinvent some wheels, and also to be able to make some of the things we
know work, work better.  For example the a historic perspective of open
data movements and in many respect the disconnect between it and open
access, open source and metadata standards and so on, makes it not as great
as it could be.  Innovation also means re-purposing the past in new.

Why re-invent, we know the religious right, and the elimination of facts
and the downright fabrication of fictitious ones in intellegent
design/creationist science is doing, combined with the dumbing down of
schools and so on, is dangerous, as is the cancellation of the census and
monitoring stations, which leads to a fictitious or worse and ill informed
future, or the inability to evaluate performance.

and so on.

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Glen Newton <glen.newton at gmail.com> wrote:

> > So we select, we forget, we destroy contexts to be able to move, to
> create new contexts. And it is good to forget too. It creates a flexibility
> for imagination. Finding the right balance is challenging (between giving
> the context and forgetting it).
>
> This all sounds very romantic.
>  However, the only acceptable reason for destroying data is because it
> is not feasible to keep/digitize/maintain it, or it is very easy to
> re-create. You cannot predict how data may be reused / repurposed in
> the future. For example: "18th century ships’ logs predict future
> weather forecast"
> http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/09/logbooksonline.aspx
>
> Traditionally archivists evaluated the value of keeping an artifact
> versus the cost of keeping it.
> That is all. Simple economics. Still applies. Just the technologies
> have changed, changing the underlying economics.
>
> -Glen
>
> On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Karl Dubost <karl at la-grange.net> wrote:
> >
> > Le 6 mai 2013 à 09:02, Tracey P. Lauriault a écrit :
> >> The Mines and Minerals section for instance, contains our Canadian
> heritage in terms of mineral exploration in Canada, from 1842 onward when
> the Geological Survey of Canada began.
> >
> > Administrative data of the past becoming a treasure for historians,
> poets, dreamers, reference points for the present. And as you said there is
> a gigantic quantity of them. 1842… 171 years ago. The industrial systems to
> produce information were reduced to fewer countries in fewer languages with
> a lower volumes.
> >
> >> yet the information about it is becoming less and less accessible to us.
> >
> > Even if we were/are digitizing everything from the past (time to do
> it/low cost of storage/etc.), it is a flow, a stream of continuous
> increase, and as you said:
> >
> >> Open data is mere technocracy if context associated with the data
> disappear.
> >
> >
> > That said. Not only, it really depends on the contextS. The same topics
> have many possible interpretation. The data themselves indeed are already
> an interpretation of the past now and with research work, we attempt to
> recreate one of these contexts for specific needs usually. But the immense
> volume of the past is dwarfed by the current volume of now, often created
> with not that much recorded contexts.
> >
> >
> >> The libraries hold that context
> >
> > Libraries hold part of these contexts.
> > And now librarians, researchers and even simple people are not enough to
> even process the now and the past. So we select, we forget, we destroy
> contexts to be able to move, to create new contexts. And it is good to
> forget too. It creates a flexibility for imagination. Finding the right
> balance is challenging (between giving the context and forgetting it).
> >
> >> and it is librarians who are the key to unraveling it.
> >
> > and the poets… the poets ;)
> >
> >
> > --
> > Karl Dubost
> > http://www.la-grange.net/karl/
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
> > CivicAccess-discuss at civicaccess.ca
> > http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss
>
>
>
> --
> -
> http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/
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-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
Post Doctoral Fellow
Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
http://datalibre.ca/
613-234-2805
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