Although I am not as experienced as some in the world of digital history, as a grad student in both history and information science with a concentration in archives, I have had trouble grappling with the concept of provenance and original order within digital collections.  Thanks to the amazing accessibility the web offers, students and researchers (especially us historians) will often be looking at images and documents far out of the context (and order) that they are situated in within the safety of a physical archives.  With this change in presentation of  records and documents and focus from a collection as a whole to single, free-standing documents, the digitization of collections has prompted the questions: Is there room for provenance and original order in the digital world?  I would like to see a session that addresses the changes collections go through when digitized and placed on the internet, and what that means for provenance and original order.  Most especially, I hope to discuss how researchers and archivists alike (in their respective manners) should/can adapt to this new(er) challenge.

1. Contrary to what I had once thought, most entering history students at my midrange institution are not yet “born digital” in terms of their approach to history or writing. History almost seems to draw in the analog-oriented. Our students are on Facebook, they can Google things, and maybe they have seen JSTOR, but so far they are not generally any more comfortable with blogging, tweeting, or website-building, for scholarly purposes, than most of my colleagues, which is to say, very uncomfortable.
2. An especially compelling reason for upgrading the digital history skills of students in my field, early American history, is the rise of online research resources, including various Founders’ papers, Early American Imprints, various newspaper databases and the large swaths of source material Google Books and the Internet Archive? Personally I have found these resources very convenient — every old book I ever checked out of Widener Library seems to have been digitized — but I have found it quite hard to manage the resulting profusion of pdfs and image files and such. The instant access to so much material also affects the research and writing process in profound ways that need to be considered. What are the best strategies for dealing with such abundance?