What the instructor, Dr Paul Wu, says about the course:
Our digital society is rapidly producing new digital assets and obsoleting “old”, traditional ones. In developed countries, new posts such as Digital Archivist are increasingly created to deal with the information management of both old and new information assets. The course surveys the theoretical frameworks developed in traditional archival studies and diplomatics, and examines the necessity and advantages of Archival Informatics for managing digital assets systematically, to prevent the loss of corporate memory and societal heritage.
Application of Archival Informatics in various domains will be reviewed for students to explore further as case studies – these may include include preservation of social media (blog, forum, wiki, facebook), evidence-based managment, and digital forensics. Through these case studies, students learn to apply fundamental principles for managing digital assets and culture for various organizations in the face of the current digital revolution.
Surprising to most people who first encounter it is the realization that Archival Informatics concerns certain long standing principles and conceptual understanding derived from Archival Science that, like classification and knowledge organization, is applicable in many areas. An article by Luciana Duranti on “Digital Diplomatics and Beyond: Towards Digital Records Forensics” (to be published in Archivaria) illustrates this. She discusses the relationship between recordkeeping/archives and forensics. Many decision making processes involve the use of records and archives, including the juridical application of laws where forensics and information discovery are required. Prof. Luciana Duranti directs the InterPARES 3 international project involving two dozen countries in which I am a co-investigator and a general study of Web is underway to discover the relevance of Web archiving in relation to the decision making and collaborative processes in eLearning and e-Social Science.