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Re: hard disk - long



In "Webster's Third New World Dictionary" among several meanings for 'document' as a noun is:  'a material substance (as a coin or stone) having on it a representation of the thoughts of men by means of some conventional mark or symbol'. I interpret this clearly to include such items as gum wrappers, watch faces, coffee cups with logos, license plates, a food service salad dressing packet, labels, price tags, hard discs, the bottom of my shoes which gives the name of the shoe, the inside of the tongue of the shoe which gives the size and where made, a dog tag, a coupon, a flower seed packet, a plane ticket, a torn cinema ticket, the bucket the exhorbitantly priced popcorn comes in if it has a logo or written message, tire tread design, the labels on garmets, saline breast implants with serial numbers, film processing bags, the stampings on metal goods, seals (not the animal, unless it is tatooed), tatooes on people as well as animals, brands on animals (animals can be branded as well as tattoed, and probably both), political candidate signs, the ubiquitous UPC codes on everything these days, etc., etc. How about designer luggage and leather goods and scarves, with Gucci or Fendi or Coach or Hermes logos or names?  I think we need to think beyond something on paper. Is a blank piece of paper a document? Even if I cannot discern a message or image, could there not be invisible ink or a difficult to see watermark? Do those characteristics then make it a 'document'?  Is there an edge blip or something, unbeknownst to me, on this otherwise 'blank' piece of paper, that conveys information? I think of the interesting forensic techniques that can lift stamping impressions, which thieves think they have eroded sufficiently. Yet lab techniques can discern, what is not visible to the human eye, the exact serial numbers and other informational symbols of autos, chain saws, guns, and other tools used (even, I surmise, scutching knives!!) for illegal purposes.   I simply have no problem in seeing documents all around me, and a hard drive is one of them. It has symbols within it that meet clearly to me the definition above.  Perhaps I look at the world from a more science-oriented perspective. Frankly, I have long wrestled with this matter, and I feel very comfortable in my conclusion which is based on what seemed logical to me after giving this a lot of thought.  
 
Sharon (No-bun-in-my-hair, yet keeping-the-world-safe-for-democracy) Butcher
 

Sharon Lee Butcher
Reference Librarian
AEDC Technical Library
100 Kindel Drive, Ste C212
Arnold AFB, TN  37389-3212
931-454-4430
Fax:  931-454-5421
sharon.butcher@arnold.af.mil

-----Original Message-----
From: Bogdan-Florin POPOVICI [mailto:bogdanpopovici@ROL.RO]
Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 12:12 PM
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: hard disk - long

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 POPOVICI
archivist
Brasov County Division of National Archives
ROMANIA