Abstract: The archivist's dilemma is that in a world with vastly more information being created, less of what we need to keep may reach archives in forms that we know how to manage. Much of present archival practice rests on four key facts: important records are generally written, records in written form typically persist over decades and sometimes centuries, description is a process external to the record itself, and the costs associated with retention lead to a requirement for appraisal and selection. We are, however, presently in the midst of cataclysmic change that could ultimately result in a world in which many important records might originally be spoken and never transcribed, much of what is written may turn out to be be ephemeral, many records will be to some extent self-describing, and the economics of appraisal and retention might reverse. I'll start with a quick recap of the technical factors that underly those changes. I'll then try to glimpse a part of that future by drawing on three projects at the University of Maryland. In one, we are working with an extensively annotated collection of spoken word materials to explore the relative strengths of external description and and self-description. In the second, joint work with Peter Brusilovsky, Daqing He and Ron Larsen, we're working with threaded discussion lists and a broader array of spoken genre, and with approaches to self-description that begin to move beyond simple "bad of words" approaches. Our third project works with four large email collections (two rescued from the file systems of corporate entities and two longitudinal collections from prominent individuals) to explore issues related to rights management and self-description. The common theme that unifies all three is a focus on conversational media that are presently ephemeral by design, but for which emerging technologies promise unprecedented capabilities for description and access. My central thesis is that search technology has the potential to be disruptive in Christiansen's sense, and that we would therefore all benefit from continuing the ongoing dialog between archivists and technologists around these issues.

Speaker's Bio:Douglas Oard is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a joint appointment in the College of Information Studies and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and his research interests center around the use of emerging technologies to support information seeking by end users. His recent work has focused on interactive techniques for cross-language information retrieval, searching conversational media, and leveraging observable behavior to improve user modeling. Additional information is available at http://www.glue.umd.edu/~oard/.