For Preservation Week here at MIT Libraries, the Curation and Preservation Services department hosted several activities. One of these was a series of three presentations on document security. Michael Halsall, Senior Network and Information Security Analyst at MIT talked of document security in the future, I talked about document security as it relates to access now and into the future, and Jana Dambrogio, MIT Libraries’ Thomas F. Peterson Conservator, talked about document security in the past in the form of letter locking.
My talk, Benign Neglect No More: How Document Security Affects Access to Memory, was a chance to talk about three central ideas. The first is document security and how there are several layers of what might be considered to be document security. The second is the concept of access and the considerations of access to what and by whom. The third is the concept of memory as information that is stored in digital files and also as the memory of the existence of digital files, storage areas, passwords, etc.
Watch the video of the presentation here [WayBack Machine version from MIT TechTV]:
Kari R. Smith “Benign Neglect No More: How Document Security Affects Access to Memory”. 2014 Preservation Week. MIT Libraries.