IL2006: Keynote Clifford Lynch

Clifford Lynch covered a lot of ground and talks on a very high level. It is important to pay attention and take notes visually, so that you can backtrack to a previous point easily. He goes off on tangents, but always comes back.

The thing that struck home for me about this particular speech was his comment about the mass of information we each are creating.

He identified a number of problems with data in scholarship, but said that scale is a big problem as well. Currently, people work off a small number of documents and may speculate on lost pieces, because they are working off all there is. Now people can deal with the scope of records available. You can't read all of the correspondence of a person if you are writing a biography, because there is too much: e-mail, blogs, computer files - all of our data is electronic. You see this in corporate litigation as well (electronic discovery). Lynch thinks that dealing with the mass of electronic files is what future inquiry will be about on these collections. This is an issue for research libraries, but also for other types of community organizations that collect personal history information.