Every industry has its own lingo. And, digital preservation is no exception as Dilbert reminds us!
Source: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-10-30/
Office Jargon
According to Office Jargon: The Good & Bad; "Business people use jargon, thinking they're showing off their intelligence or trying to win respect from their peers, even if it doesn't work that way", said Michael Sebastian, a Web editor at Ragan Communications, a Chicago-based publishing and training company.
Others turn to jargon to avoid offending people or appearing politically incorrect, said Chelsea Hardaway, the co-author of "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots."
So they'll use terms such as "right sizing" for layoffs. Or, Hardaway said, "my plate's pretty full," is a way workers avoid saying they'd "rather die than take on your project."
[A note about this blog entry: The blogging staff of Digital Directions is taking a short summer break. However, we dove back into our hundreds of posts and thought you might enjoy revisiting this interesting topic originally posted Thursday, December 1, 2011.]
Therefore, I pretend to know everything!
R. D. Lang wrote about the predicament Dilbert's Digital Media Curator found himself, in his book Knots.
There is something I don't know
That I am supposed to know.
I don't know what it is I don't know,
And yet am supposed to know,
And I feel I look stupid
If I seem both not to know
And not to know what it is I don't know.
Therefore, I pretend I know it.
This is nerve-wracking
Since I don't know what I must pretend
To know.
Therefore, I pretend to know everything.
I feel you know what I am supposed to know
But you can't tell me what it is
Because you don't know what I don't know
What it is.
You may know what I don't know, but not
That I don't know it.
And I can't tell you. So you will have
To tell me everything.
Jill Hurst-Wahl, MLS, a digitization consultant and owner of Hurst Associates, Ltd., actually took the time to research and define digital curation this way in her Digitization101 blog post of July 1, 2009;
"Digital curation, broadly interpreted, is about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use. (DCC)
The term digital curation is...the actions needed to maintain digital research data and other digital materials over their entire life-cycle and over time for current and future generations of users. (DCC)
... it is the active management and appraisal of digital information over its entire life cycle. (Pennock)"
Knowledge is Power - So, Get Powerful!
Isn't it funny how a little knowledge can make a big difference?
Want to eliminate redundant, silly, altered or overused phrases that may have slipped into your digital preservation vocabulary? Here are 3 great resources to get you started;
- The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) Preservation Glossary
- A Bibliography of Glossaries for Archivists, Records Managers, Special Collections Librarians, Manuscript Curators, and other Related Information Professionals (National Archives)
- Digital Preservation Glossary (University of Michigan)
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