Digital Commons Network^™

Born Digital: Event-Driven Archives, Vincent Capone

Graduate History Conference, UMass Boston

The growth of the internet has brought numerous tools and opportunities for archivists to both enhance their collections and reach out to potential patrons. Archives across the globe have begun immense digitization efforts to bring collections into the digital age and make them accessible to a broader audience. But what challenges face new archives whose collections are born-digital? How do these archives prove that they are indeed an archival facility and not simply a memory institution? These questions have risen around numerous digital archives born in the past decade to document and commemorate social events and tragic disasters, including the …