Born Digital: Event-Driven Archives

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 September 11th Digital Archives, the Occupy Archives, the April 16 Archive which documents the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007, and archives dedicated to the Egyptian Revolution and protests in Tahrir Square. These event-driven archives are working to preserve both relics of the events in question and social media and digital responses that defined the event on the internet. These archives face a unique strategy for collecting and tagging materials used to create and build the archive, utilizing the power of mass participation on the internet, a response which challenges traditional archival practice. Further obstacles, such as building appropriate finding aids and search criteria, plague these archives. Fear that these event-sensitive archives may only be relevant as long as the event remains in the public’s consciousness concerns archivists, who see a drop in researchers after a period of time. Nonetheless, these archives are transforming the traditional archival principles of acquisition and accessibility, and are creating a new class of digital archives in the twenty-first century