To opine without much forethought:

A traditional way to look at the role of archivist is as steward — physically preserving, intellectually curating, and providing access to archival collections. In some cases, we digitize collections in their entirety or at least in large part, and in other cases we create online exhibits from selections of our physical material. My biggest concern as an archivist is the former. Why shouldn’t our stewardship extend to our digitized material. There seems to be an aimless drive in many archives to digitize materials in order to take advantage of potential grant funding, or because we feel like we *should* be throwing digital stuff online. There is no plan, no priorities that sync with collection policies, and no organizational plan to maintain and evolve content and discovery systems over time.

I think the digital preservation field is starting to tackle some of these issues in the context of digital libraries their output will be useful to see how folks are thinking about what stewardship of digital materials might look like.

For online exhibits, then I think we get into the issues with revising and evolving that you raise. Personally, I see many online exhibits as equivalents to physical exhibits; they are creative, engaging, and ephemeral. But, as we don’t keep old, uncared for material lying around our reading rooms, let’s not leave unsightly stuff in our web presences either.

And, if I may toss out one more opinion, there should be a call to not see our finding aids as static documents. We interpret and as our understanding changes, so must our descriptions.

Looking forward to hearing more about this!