SSC: Steady State of Confusion

I get confused easily. In a world of acronyms, I guess I should expect that. Take DROID, for example. I've seen the commercials for the new phone by Motorola, not that I immediately ran out and bought one. I'm a Tracfone user, so take from that what you will. I know that it is a Smartphone, it has thousands of applications called ANDROID, and it has Google search. I don't know much more than that, even if the Verizon website has a lot more to say about it. But, for a while there, I thought that it also had a connection to archives.

You see, The National Archives of the United Kingdom has developed a software called Digital Repository Object Identifier or – wait for it – DROID. All for the sake of digital preservation, DROID identifies file formats to be utilized in another software program designed by The National Archives called PRONOM, which is a public file format registry. If I understood this all better, I'd explain it better, but I don't. I usually need to see software and other various technologies in action before it starts to make a lick of sense. However, if you find yourself desperate to know more, check out this post from the Practical E-Records blog. The author tried out the software and posted some helpful screenshots to make the experience more visual.

DROID and PRONOM (PRONOM PUID if you're nasty) are simply two examples of multitudinous software developed over the last several years to make archivists' lives either better and easier or all the more confusing. There are content management systems like PastPerfect, Archivist's Toolkit, and Archon. There are EAD (that encoding standard I mentioned briefly in a previous post) authoring tools. There are acronyms galore. I'd love to get my mind around all of it, but it just doesn't seem possible. I envisioned a series of posts profiling tasks or items that I taught myself to do or use, and I might succeed yet, but looking at what DROID does and the other software that surrounds it and feeling totally at sea, I wonder if it's all more than my brain drive capacity can handle. But my eyes have always been bigger than my stomach. Take, for example, a plan I hatched years ago to go through my local library's online catalog and start reading about every subject on there. Every single one. Talk about information overload. Sometimes I think I'd rather be confused.