On Digital Archives: Lessons from the Susan Sontag Hard Drives

Abstract

This paper relates to work I was involved in when I was Director of UCLA Library Special Collections, to acquire two hard drives of documents, correspondence, email, photographs, and other materials created and compiled by Susan Sontag over the course of the last dozen years of her life. This process raised technical, ethical, philosophical, financial, and practical issues that still seem new to the archival endeavor. The paper features a narrative of this acquisition, intended as a case study that allows us to examine multiple dimensions in the changing nature of archives and archival institutions. In particular, it considers how born digital materials should and do factor into the overall marketplace for literary archives, which remains largely undetermined.