Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage
Personal archives
This collection of essays explores the practical aspects of archiving outside of an institutional setting. The authors specifically address issues that everyday people confront when trying to figure out how to handle not only the growing size of their digital footprint, but also how to preserve one’s family or personal history. Mike Ashenfelder from the Library of Congress accurately identifies the current dilemma: “Most of the general public—the largest group of digital-file stakeholders in the world—are unaware of what digital preservation or personal digital archiving is or why they should care.”
Ashenfelder stresses that organization and redundancy are key to confronting the issue. Personal Archiving also addresses topics ranging from how to create a family archive, software choices (although these will change over time), digital inheritance, legal implications, and social media concerns. The volume is written in an easy-to-understand tone and addresses the issues facing a generation of digital users who may or may not realize they are at risk of losing their personal archive in terms of pictures, correspondence, and documents unless they create a backup plan.
Donald Hawkins, ed.
Information Today, INC.
2013
Robert Clarke
Book
ISBN-13: 978-1573874809
Low Cost and No Cost Ways to Preserve Family Archives
Personal archives
Family archives are valuable because they tell a story about people and communities, future generations have a record of their history and ancestors, and they can become national treasures. In Low Cost and No Cost Ways to Preserve Family Archives, Karen Brown explores the basics of gathering and preserving family mementos, artifacts, books, papers, and photographs. The webinar offers practical advice regarding best practices of storage, handling, and preserving family memories. She emphasizes that in order to preserve family collections, prevention is key: preventing damages in the first place. Prevention is the most effective and inexpensive way of ensuring that collections remain long-lasting.
Karen E.K. Brown, Association for Library Collections and Technical Services
Association for Library Collections and Technical Services
2014
Robert Clarke
Webinar
MOVIO: A Toolkit for Creating Curated Digital Exhibitions
Curation
This paper details the development and implementation of the MOVIO project. The Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism (MiBACT) outlined best practices for groups presenting historical and educational archival information to the general public via online digital exhibitions. The authors argue that the purpose of online digital exhibitions is to “…provide alternative or extending denser experiences… the user in a process of discovery”. With this framework, the GruppoMeta organization began designing and developing the MOVIO project. The authors describe the project as a semantic content management system built around vastly detailed metadata. The content, which can be video, images, audio, or text, can be assembled by the user or a curator via the Ontology Builder. Once specific nodes are built, the system will identify relevant content using the detailed metadata. The project is currently released under a MIT open source license and is seeking further development resources from the European community.
Minelli, Sam Habibia, Natale, Maria Teresab, Ongaro, Paoloa, Piccininno, Marziab, Saccoccio, Rubinoa, and Ugoletti, Danielea
Procedia Computer Science
2014-01-30
Raible, John
Journal
Beyond the Encyclopedia: Collective Memories in
Wikipedia
Collective memory
Michela Ferron and Paolo Massa employ a quantitative study of Wikipedia as a digital archive in order to show how one can view memory as an active process. The authors begin with a discussion of Web 2.0 as public, private, and modifiable, but unable to be completely erased. They further assert that backups of the Internet, particularly in the case of Wikipedia, allowed them to conduct longitudinal studies about data. Ferron and Massa used an XML file to show the revision history of all pages of the English Wikipedia on September 16, 2010, arguing that a revision spike occurs near the anniversary of a traumatic event. They found that pages relating the September 11, 2001 attacks received an average of 10, 701 edits per day during the anniversary, and only 4,619 edits per day otherwise. Ferron and Massa compared this data to Wikipedia pages for non-traumatic events, like Woodstock and Apollo 11, which did not receive as much attention.
Ferron, Michela
Massa, Paolo
2013
Sara Raffel
Journal
Organizing Archival Records: A Practical Method Of Arrangement And Description For Small Archives
Archives
This book equips non-professional archivists with the skills to tackle one of the most challenging tasks of archiving: arranging and describing archival materials. Carmicheal offers step-by-step guidance to understanding the purpose of organization and the essentials of how to do it. He covers the basic terms and theory of organization, and how to avoid some common pitfalls.
Carmicheal, David W.
10-12-2012
Elena Rogalle
Book
ISBN 978-0-7591-2169-0
New Media: The Key Concepts.
Archives
This book addresses six key concepts that are pivotal for understanding the influence of new media on contemporary culture. The specific chapter on Archive lays the groundwork for understanding digital archiving. It reiterates the work of Derrida and Foucault, providing context, while also touching on new technology uses in the digital age. Gane and Beer conclude “archives are depositories for the storage of written documents. This chapter provides foundational history on digital archiving while touching on critical theorists creating a bridge between literary studies and technology. As an introductory chapter on the archive, it provides a scope of understanding for new scholars interested in learning about creating an archive.
Gane, Nicholas
Beer, David
2012
Elena Rogalle
Book
ISBN-13: 978-1845201333
Archival Storage Standards
Archives
A new policy directive establishing the internal NARA structural, environmental control, fire safety, preservation, and security standards for appropriate archival storage conditions in NARA archival facilities
Carlin, John W.
National Archives and Records Administration
15 Feb. 2002
Korosec, Pat
NARA
Document
Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts
Archives
Selecting and appraising archives and manuscripts is an introductory text describing the challenges and processes in selecting and appraising archives and manuscripts to ensure the maintained quality of an archive.
Boles, Frank
Society of American Archivists
May 2005
Branch, Justin
Book
ISBN: 9781931666114
Becoming Digital: The Challenges of Archiving Digital Photographs
Archives
Digital photography has recently become one of society's important means of recording. For this reason it has also become a potential archival record of great significance. However, as of yet, few born-digital (defined in opposition to "made digital" or "digitized" photographs, which are created by scanning analogue sources), photographs have been acquired by archives. Furthermore, few seem likely to be acquired in the immediate future. While there has been considerable attention given in archival literature to conventional photography and archives, as well as to textual electronic records and archives, little has been written about digital photography. This thesis addresses this archival challenge and aims to encourage a more active and informed archival response to digital photography
Rae Simonson, Karen
University of Manitoba Press
2006
Branch, Justin
Book
ISBN: 9780494229019
Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics
Pedagogy
With its roots in discussions following the 2009 Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics is an examination of the pedagogy of digital humanities, a sector that has often been neglected in favor of theories, principles and research.
Hirsch, Brett D.
Open Book Publishers
2012
Branch, Justin
E-Book
ISBN: 9781909254251