Gone in a Flash? Personal Digital Archiving Workshop

Gone in a Flash? Personal Digital Archiving Workshop

Personal archives

"Gone In a Flash?" is the recording of a digital archiving workshop conducted at Columbia University in 2012. The workshop illuminates organization and preservation practices important for individuals, especially academics, who want to make sure their work, whether textual or multimedia, is accessible in the future. The presenters emphasize the importance of writing an explicit archival policy for oneself that includes a list of items that need to be saved, as well as when, where, and how to save them. Individual items should be documented as in a professional archive so that if items are found much later, the viewer can tell where they came from, how they were created, and any software that one may need to access them.

Personal archives, like any professional archive, must be managed and maintained. One must cull them for unnecessary information, and establish a backup calendar so that three copies of the work are kept at all times and in different places. The workshop also delves into university resources, such as academic creative commons, that can help scholars by backing up the information on a fixed schedule and completing the metadata.

Columbia University

2012-10-02

Sara Raffel

Video recording

Columbia University. “Gone in a Flash? Personal Digital Archiving Workshop.” On YouTube. October 2, 2012.