Dear List,
First of all, thanks for all your
answers. I found this problem (on HD as a document) in a law on the military
secrets. First I considered it funny, but soon I noticed that I have not
well-grounded theoretical arguments to say if it is or it is not an archival
object. And debates on the List seem to agree with that. Most of the answers were "public", I
mean TO the List, so I won’t "digest" them. Yet, there are few positions:
1. HD is the medium or a
storage device, and only the files (text, image, database etc.) are
documents. And
2. Considering, as a very large definition,
document as "information stored on a medium", almost anything, i.e. including
HD and a lot of other sheetsJ (food package, medication box etc.)
is document. My initial idea was to vote for the first team. As others also suggested, I'm interested in information on HD, not in the "piece", the device itself. Is HD a storage device? It seems to me as storage area for computer files as a sheet of paper for letters. Of course, the "iconography" of Windows, as it has been said, showed as a filing cabinet, but we must not forget that when copying files, it appears a flying sheet of paper - the "medium" of document; but which is this medium for real? Information is ON something, and, in this case, the medium is HD. Therefore, I suppose HD should be a document. On the other hand, it's kind of
funny to think at the, let's say, "Mrs. Thatchers' HD-s collection". Imagine
shelves full of HDs… Or to the case when the records manager goes to an employee
and asks for hers/his HD: "you're gonna give it to me, 'cause it's an archival
object". It's quite strange, isn't it? We all know that this "document"—HD—will
be used over and over again: – Until it cracks. And if it cracks,
what need for it in Archives? – OR, until it is replaced. But, in
this situation, I cannot really imagine someone who doesn't copy all hers/his
files on the new HD. Or the HD cannot find a new owner, to be used until it
cracks.
Going further joking, do we appraise
HD or files on HD? Would someone throw away a HD, if it works properly, just
because it's full with unneeded files? Or "cut" from HD those sectors that
contain the informatin appraised? Of course not.
On the other hand, HDs store a lot
of other files that weren't intended to be saved and cannot be seen
(or, better said, cannot usually be seen), as cookies, history records, fragment
of files that can be recovered with special software. For experts (intelligence
team, f.i.), could be essential to retrieve some information that the user had
deleted before. Another example: we still have the papers of famous writers; we
might now reconstruct previous versions of novels and poems. Where will all
those stuff be on the writer's computer? At least a part of those versions could
be recovered from HD.
What is clear for me is that we have
here a very non-classical and unclearJ situation. I don't know if there is
a term to define this kind of documents, whose medium has the propriety to be
renewed, until it technically cracks. HD is such a special document, like a
video tape or a carbon copy, I think. Can we consider CC as document? Yes, I
have no doubt of that. Even if on that CC could be impressed a lot of
signes, from different documents that once have been typed using that CC. Of
course, we might find it not very attractive for long-term
preservation. Still, for military secret purposes (here is
from where I left), yes, all these documents (CCs, HDs, printer ribbons etc.)
must be take into custody as documents. But for archivists, all these are
"special" documents, with special features: special techniques of appraisal,
special archival order, special access devices etc. This kind of stuff should be
stored themself, like museum objects or should be copied? I really have no
idea for that. Eventually, I think it is still a provocative topic for
nowadays-archival science.
Thanks for being so patient to read
thisJ. Best wishes, Bogdan-Florin
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