IT's Personal: collecting, preserving and using personal digital archives, Digital Preservation Coalition, 28 April 2015
Live notes, so an incomplete, partial record of what actually happened.
http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/91-personal-digital-archives?xref=117
Tags: DPC_itspersonal
Gabriela Redwine, Yale (Beinecke Library)
Forthcoming DPC Tech Watch report on the subject.
Perception that items in digital foramats less worth saving a pervasive undercurrent to PDA work.
Larry Kramer Papers: references to digital files in papers show these collections are inevitably mixed collections.
People have personal connections with their digital media.
Seemingly inconsequential material can become significant in context.
Fluidity and enormity - practical decisions over what is significant or not could result in not saving something that would have been significant later
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>"Personal digital archives matter because personal lives matter." As good a reason as any for digital preservation #DPC_ITsPersonal
— Chris Fryer (@C_Fryer) April 28, 2015
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Gabriela Redwine: Personal archives are distributed, for example on social media. What is the reach of the 'personal'? #DPC_ITsPersonal
— Sara Day Thomson (@sdaythomson) April 28, 2015
Threats: hardware/software obsolescence, insecure backup [doing the best you can with the resources you have... realistic gap between theory and practice, reality and truth], disasters, neglect, loss of host/service, lack of planning, death, lack of understanding about cloud
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Gabriela Redwine: inevitable gap between theory and practice ... advice for digital preservation needs to be practical #DPC_ITsPersonal
— Sara Day Thomson (@sdaythomson) April 28, 2015
Integrating personal blogs with personal digital archives
On the one hand people know digital files are transitory, but then on the other hand hard to get rid off when you don't want them: can be found online, extracted from disks.
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Gabriela Redwine "Easy to amass digital content, difficult to manage it." #DPC_ITsPersonal
— Jenn Arndt (@b4ssm4st3r) April 28, 2015
Distributed nature of personal digital archives. More active they are managed, more likely they are to be saved.
Discussion points:
- who should archive social media? (particular if the goal of institutions is access)
- should we keep physical media where the data has been transferred to another media?
- physical objects very personal. Can contain important info (not just fetish!)
- future tech might be able to capture stuff that is currently inaccessible
- respecting wishes, keeping only what people want to be kept
Bette Baldwin, Hoar Oak Cottage Community Group
Based on Exmoor. Small community heritage group based around the lives of the inhabitants of a cottage.
Digital Archives problem. Large photographic record of the cottage (born-digital and digitised).
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Now moving on to a mix of case studies, starting with Bette Baldwin from http://t.co/T8X9muIaUM #DPC_ITsPersonal
— Paul Wheatley (@prwheatley) April 28, 2015
Recommended by local record office to print stuff our and bring it in a box in order to preserve... Then recommended commercial solution: eHive
Got involved in networks and realised that many similar groups have a similar problem... And print things out keeps being the message.
James Baker, British Library
Me! A workflow experiment; or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): notes/slides
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>3 day blitz by BL staff to build a personal archives workflow by getting hands on with key software and data. Nice! #DPC_ITsPersonal
— Paul Wheatley (@prwheatley) April 28, 2015
Jenny Bunn, University College London
Lots of claims of ownership around personal digital archives.
Human computer interaction world are doing this but not connecting with us
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>#DPC_ITsPersonal Ministry of Provenance: What Is Provenance? https://t.co/eo7E3Hq26J
— James Baker (@j_w_baker) April 28, 2015
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Bringing archive to the personal, Jenny Bunn discusses the need for giving individuals an awareness of curation #DPC_ITsPersonal
— Sara Day Thomson (@sdaythomson) April 28, 2015
We are about the greater good.
Same problems in PDA as records management: relying on broad base of compliance with what we want to do.
Mine is... mine, yours, ours?
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>.@JnyBn1 calls to be more open and less hostile as a profession. Esp. around Digital Curation/Preservation work. Bingo! #DPC_ITsPersonal
— Chris Fryer (@C_Fryer) April 28, 2015
Amber Cushing, University College Dublin
Distinction between a digital possession (psychological - eg self extension through things) and a digital item.
People think at archiving during life transitions.
People see services such as Facebook as a storage locker for their stuff, and their stuff in their is their stuff at an item level (but not a collection level). See maintaining digital possessions as building a digital legacy.
Literature on archives, human-computer interaction, psychology et cetera on personal digital collection aligning and overlapping - so fewer silos.
Leap from research to practice has been disappointing.
We don't attach to digital items in the same way we do physical items. So how do we go about creating that attachment?
Mike Ashenfelder, Library of Congress & Jeff Ubois, MacArthur Foundation
Mike
From "Huh?" to "Oh, yeah" - that is the change is the last few years from personal digital archives. Recognition of what is at stake has grown.
Photography has moved from cameras to phones. And so everyday people are stakeholders in this.
National Digital Stewardship Residency. About digital preservation, but happens to currently have a personal digital focus.
How to advice aimed to the public re personal digital archiving popular - see the Signal blog
Jeff
Personal Digital Archiving annual conference. Attempt to solidify practice, share common language.
Themes: institutional perspectives (and making them relevant to a large public); communities (eg Through a Lens Darkly); professionals wrestling with personal archiving (artists, scholars are usually not archivists); discussions that a media type focused (moving to the next fire hose...); what can you leave to the robots later? (if facial/handwriting recognition); what we still do not know...
Set of questions around selection and appraisal, around interface design, around access and interpretation (who will use them and how)
Videos from conference presentations on the Internet Archive: eg 2013
QA
Personal digital archiving an imposing title. As is the task: where do I start?
What do we tell depositors about what is going to be done with their stuff? -- imposing to not impose yourself on the collection that is going to come to you...
We don't have much evidence about how readers are using this collections (apart from word of mouth).
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