Today I went to London to attend a Digital Preservation Coalition event on Personal Digital Archives. I like going to London and I like going to these sorts of workshops. I also like the time for reflection sat in the quiet carriage of a Virgin train on the way home. There is something about being cut off from the internet and away from the everyday distractions of the office which helps focus the mind.
Today was interesting because I expect like many of the attendees I was there with two hats on – being able to benefit from the day both as a digital archivist and as an individual with my own personal digital archive to maintain.
What follows is not so much a summing up of the day, but just a quick mention of some of the thoughts I’m taking away.
Gabriella Redwine from the Beinecke Library at the University of Yale gave a great introduction to the topic of personal digital archives, and defining them as the things created by or about an individual, a rather formal term for the digital stuff we all create over the course of our lives. We all have them. They are fragile, regularly neglected and at risk of loss. People tend to manage them when faced with a crisis (eg: computer virus), problem (eg: running out of storage space) or life changing event (eg: moving house or job). We as digital archivists need to be able to advise individuals on how to manage their own digital archives in the hope that the material will survive long enough to be deposited within an archive in the future if appropriate.
Amber Cushing from University College Dublin gave a really interesting talk on how people assign value to their digital files. Both her and Gabriella made the point (that I had only been partially aware of) that people tend to place less value on digital than physical things, that the born-digital is seen as less important than something you can more easily see or hold. I appear to be guilty of this myself I realise. Every year I take hundreds of digital photographs which I store on my computer. These are of high value to me. They provide a record of my life and my family and I want to keep them so that I and subsequent generations can look back on them. Despite the high value I place on them I don’t back them up as often as I should and have even been known to lose some (see previous confession).
At the end of each year I create a photo book for that year. A printed, glossy, hard back album of selected photos from that year, with a title page and captions (documentation and metadata!). I love to receive the finished photo book through the post and place even more value on this physical object than I did of the original photos. This is clear by the fact that I hover around the kids as they look at it, checking that they don’t have grubby hands and worrying that they might inadvertently rip a page whilst turning it.
Do I have the same level of worry when they access my digital originals? No, I happily let them click through them on the computer, never checking whether they had accidentally edited or deleted one or moved an image out of its context from one folder to another. These are eventualities which are probably just as likely (but harder to spot and thus rectify) than damage to the physical book*.
Is this slightly skewed notion of value a result of the extra time and effort I have put into arranging the photographs into a physical book, the expense of having had to pay for it to be printed, or simply down to the fact that it is shiny and I can hold it?
Anyway, this is a slight tangent. It was really interesting to hear about Amber’s research on possession and self extension in relation to personal digital archives and how we as individuals may or may not assign value to the digital stuff that we create.
I was also really pleased to hear James Baxter from the British Library talk about a practical way they had set up workflows for dealing with personal digital archives that have been put in their care. Shutting himself and colleagues in a room for 3 days with some media, and some tools in order to brainstorm workflows and make progress with trying to access, identify and preserve some of this born digital material seemed like a great approach and there were some useful lessons learned from the process. I liked the ‘learning by doing’ approach that he advocated. I tend to agree that the best way to find out if something is going to work is to roll up your sleeves and have a go.
Another repeated message of the day was about language and how we can communicate and bring people along with us. Mike Ashenfelder from the Library of Congress mentioned that though libraries may run personal digital archiving courses for the public, it is hard to compete with other courses and learning opportunities with more appealing names. Amber mentioned that when interviewing people for her research, she avoided use of the term 'archiving' instead asking them about how they ‘maintained’ their digital files.
Having over the last week taught two sessions at the University of York on ‘Research Data Management’ I can relate to this problem. Getting people to come along and engage with a topic that has quite a dry title can certainly be a challenge. Perhaps as Mike suggested “looking after your digital stuff” would make it clearer what we were talking about and its immediate relevance to all of us!
My train journey is nearly over so I’ll leave it there, having over the course of this journey created yet another thing to add to my own digital legacy.
I’m looking forward to reading the new DPC technology watch report on the subject of personal digital archiving in the near future.
* yes, I know I could do this with checksums but I do not create checksums for my personal digital files...my life is busy!
Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist
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