SoA Conference cont.

Looks like I'm alone in criticising the SoA conference this year. Anna Towlson from the LSE attended the first day. Her report is here. Chris Prom and Caroline Brown from the University of Dundee both thought the conference had a lot to impart. Their notes are here.

Chris Prom is visiting Briton from the University of Illinois. His personal blog has posts on sessions, and a lovely photo of Bath Abbey. His post on the Archives, Records and Artefacts blog indicates that much of the discussion around e-records (and the continuing preservation of these records??) took place in the RM themed talks. I admit I didn't go to any of these as they looked to be mostly theory and strategy rather than action (my reasoning being that I can get theory and strategy from the web). Maybe I was wrong about their content.

Caroline Brown was one of the speakers at the conference. She gave one of the round-ups at the end. I found her talk engaging and agreed with most of it, but was alarmed and dispirited by her use of a quote from Hugh Taylor identifying electronic media and records as a paradigm shift. What was dispiriting about this is that Hugh Taylor wrote it in 1987. Why, 22 years later, are we still seeing electronic records as something we need to get our heads around?

And where has the conference blog gone? The link on the SoA website disappeared immediately after the conference.