(apologies for cross-postings)

Announcement: Day of Digital Archives, Oct. 6th, 2011

The Day of Digital Archives is an initiative to raise awareness of digital archives among both users and managers. On this day, archivists, digital humanists, programmers, or anyone else creating, using, or managing digital archives are asked to devote some of their social media output (i.e. tweets, blog posts, youtube videos, etc.) to describing their work with digital archives. By collectively documenting what we do, we will be answering questions like: What are digital archives? Who uses them? How are they created and managed? Why are they important? This year's Day of Digital Archives will be held on October 6th and entries will be gathered at the Day of Digital Archives blog<http://dayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com/>.
What is meant by "digital archives" well, primarily archives, repositories, content management systems and other initiatives that collect or manage born-digital material. These initiatives don't have to primarily collect born-digital materials...in fact they are more likely to only have some born-digital content as part of their mandate. Or, maybe they don't really have a "mandate" at all...maybe someone will contribute their thoughts about managing their own personal digital content or social media presence. The thread ties the participants together is that they collect, manage, preserve, develop, use, think about or otherwise love born-digital content.
Do you create, manage, or use digital archives? Would you like to participate? Well then, drop me a line at gretchen[.]gueguen[@]gmail[.]com with your contact info and I'll keep you up to date!

You could contribute in a couple of ways:

1. Create a blog post at http://dayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com/<https://mail.eservices.virginia.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=bba55a057e9a45dfbe9cd50d4b610e66&URL=http%3a%2f%2fdayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com%2f> for the 6th of October (rather that writing it on October 6th, you can pre-write it to automatically post on the 6th as well) talking about some aspect of your work with Digital Archives on that day. It could be a really specific exploration of a single activity on that day. Or it could be a broader topic not really related to that specific day (What kinds of tools you could really use to process a born-digital collection).

2. Write a post to your own blog similar to that described above and post a trackback to the Day of Digital Archives blog

3. Tweet throughout the day about your work with digital archives using the #digitalArchivesDay hashtag
Even if you can't contribute a post or a tweet, be sure to keep up with the blog on the 6th and join the discussion in the comments.

Gretchen Gueguen
Digital Archivist, Digital Curation Services
University of Virginia Library
PO Box 400114
Charlottesville, VA 22904
(434) 924-4073