If bits are not enough: preservation practices of the original contest for born digital literary archives

Abstract

PAD – Pavia Archivi Digitali was created in 2009, alongside the Centre for Research in the Manuscript Tradition of Modern and Contemporary Authors, with the aim of acquiring, preserving and giving access to born- digital papers of contemporary writers and journalists. The archives which were bestowed to PAD so far show a variety of features involving a considerable effort in defining and fine-tuning both the ingest procedures and the management of the preserved papers life-cycle. One of the crucial issues is the preliminary analysis of the logical and technical structure of these archives. For this purpose the writer is interviewed and more information is collected through a specific questionnaire. By combining the two one gains a valuable insight into his or her working methods and files arrangement logic. The literature on the subject is still quite scarce, since researchers have been more keen to focus either on traditional archives or on digital archives though characterized by a greater stability. To share reflections emerged in response to the various acquisitions is therefore the aim of this paper.