Personal Digital Archiving Research Articles

Personal digital archiving: influencing factors and challenges to practices

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the associations of personal archiving behaviors to factors and challenges that have been assumed to affect personal digital archiving strategies.Design/methodology/approachThis study created an online survey to understand general patterns of personal digital archiving practices and related phenomena. The survey was employed to investigate to what extent people show a certain behavior or feel certain factors and challenge when archiving personal digital content.FindingsSome of the findings of this study regarding specific personal digital archiving practices were in accordance with existing studies. However, the associations between digital archiving challenges and archiving practices were not observed statistically significantly as assumed in previous studies. General technology efficacy and the awareness of the importance of personal records appeared to influence personal archiving practices.Research limitations/implicationsThis study used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. As this is not a commonly used internet service, the workers here could have higher than average levels of internet efficacy. This possibility may have affected the demographics, and the survey responses may be biased in this respect.Practical implicationsAs the study results suggest that technology efficacy and personal heritage awareness are the influencing factors of personal digital archiving, these are the areas where information professionals can involve in assisting users for future cultural heritage.Originality/valueThis is the first study that develops measures for personal digital archiving related practices and perceptions that the previous qualitative studies have identified. With these measures, it examines the general status of individuals’ archiving strategies and the overall associations of digital archiving challenges as well as looking into other technological and personal factors.

Personal digital archiving: an analysis of URLs in the .edu domain

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider personal digital archiving (PDA) from an academic perspective. Although elements of research data management and personal information management are relevant, it is unclear what is available on university websites supporting PDA. The following question guided the research: where is “PDA” content housed in the top-level .edu domain and what is the format and nature of the content made available?Design/methodology/approachThis descriptive study analyzed Google hits yielded by searching “PDA” within the .edu domain. Results were analyzed to determine where content was housed and its format and nature. Placement in the domain, delivery methods, topics, and the nature of the most highly ranking Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) were analyzed.FindingsIn the academy, PDA is not exclusively of interest in libraries; not quite half of the .edu URLs (45 percent) pointed to a library site. Scholarly papers were the most returned content, followed by blogs and conferences information. Closer analysis of the top 20 URLs showed that libraries are popular and papers, and blogs continue to be dominant.Research limitations/implicationsThe results suggest good PDA practices and recommendations are evolving. Academic librarians should examine these practices, refine them, and make them available and discoverable on the web.Originality/valueThis is the first paper, to the knowledge, to consider PDA content from the perspective of universities and university libraries.

Editorial

Editorial

Data organization and preservation in the context of digital and networked media

This paper presents the results of a small scale survey on attitudes, habits and practices of Croatian working population in relation to digital curation of personal digital data. The survey was driven by the following research questions: What are the attitudes of working population towards organizing and safekeeping digital documents that they create in everyday life? To what extent is personal digital archiving among working population a planned activity or just a side-effect of generating content in the digital environment? How do they organize and preserve digital data and documents, both offline and online? What are their attitudes to digital afterlife and digital legacy? Data has been collected in the period from November 2015 to January 2016 through an online questionnaire distributed through online social networks and e-mails aiming to reach the employed population in the age group from 18 to 65 in Croatia. The analysis of the results shows detailed behaviour patterns when it comes to preservation practices as well as attitudes towards taking responsibility for safekeeping personal digital data and documents. The results are also discussed in the light of the implication that these issues may have on user studies and services in libraries and archives.

Literature and Writers in the Digital Age: A Small-Scale Survey of Contemporary Croatian Writers’ Organization and Preservation Practices

Abstract Authors and other creative workers today are faced with the (r)evolution of digital technology and media that slowly change and challenge the way they create, disseminate, and preserve their work. The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes, habits, and practices of contemporary Croatian writers in a small-scale sample in terms of the creation, organization, and preservation of digital documents and various literary forms. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with nine contemporary Croatian writers and examined through narrative analysis of the interview transcripts. The research highlighted areas that need to be more thoroughly considered when we are dealing with issues of personal digital archiving, digital legacies, and the preservation of digital cultural heritage in general. In-depth interviews with respondents indicated one particularly important issue: that preserving the context of their work is as important as preserving the work itself.

Conference Spotlight: The Personal Digital Archiving Conference, April 24–26, 2015, New York, NY, USA

Conference Spotlight: The Personal Digital Archiving Conference, April 24–26, 2015, New York, NY, USA

Here, I Used to Be

This article examines how location-based mobile media technologies are affecting the ways individuals experience the relationship between memory and place. We argue that location-based mobile applications that allow people to check in to places or record their routes represent new practices of place-based digital memory. Many individuals are using mobile media to mobilize place and memory together to create new forms of digital network memory from which they may begin to remember their pasts and to write their histories—a kind of rhetorical and poetic memory making. To help illuminate these practices, we analyze applications such as Foursquare and My Tracks and draw on research in mobilities studies, new media studies, and memory studies to introduce and advance concepts such as personal digital archiving and digital network memory. These practices of place-based digital memory have consequences for understanding the interrelationships between mobility, place, memory, and mobile media.

Personal Digital Archiving Conference, New York University, April 24-26, 2015

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of presentations and discussions held at the sixth Personal Digital Archiving Conference held at New York University, April 24-26, 2015. Design/methodology/approach – A narrative approach is used to describe the event. Findings – As individuals lead increasingly online lives and digital objects become correspondingly important to the archive, a whole host of issues from the technical to the ethical arises. Conference presentations ran the gamut, touching on all of these complicated areas and fleshing out the scope of the challenges that lie ahead for individuals grappling with their own data as well as archivists working to be responsible stewards of that data into the future. Practical implications – This review touches on key practical, technical and ethical issues in the field of personal digital archiving, a new and increasingly important area for libraries and archives. Originality/value – The conference explores current challenges and practices in personal digital archiving.

Helping Members of the Community Manage Their Digital Lives: Developing a Personal Digital Archiving Workshop

It is estimated that over 90 percent of all new information is born digital. We create new digital materials practically on a daily basis. What can we as libraries do to help our users manage their personal digital materials? This article explores resources and methods that could be used in the development of a personal digital archiving workshop and how to best tailor it to your library audience.

Exploring the methods and practises of personal digital information archiving among the student population

The issue of personal archiving is one often raised in the context of the fast changing digital era. Even among the “informationally literate” personal digital archiving is more often simply a side-effect of generating content in the digital environment than a planned activity. The aim of this paper is to research the extent to which the student population employs the doctrines of digital curation, digital preservation and digital stewardship. This group is interesting for examining in this context because of the unique mixture of formal, mainly scholarly, and personal information that they govern in their day to day activities and in digital formats. Some of the information that this research attempted to obtain concerned the actions individuals undertake to acquire, store and conserve digital objects, the formats they use and the practices they employ in the process. An attempt was made to determine whether the migration of content is practiced, where and how digital information is stored, as well as whether or not scholarly objects (such as those used for study) are handled differently than informal ones (such as those used for entertainment and other private purposes). The paper also provides insight into student practices regarding the creation of digital copies of objects and the use of other media such as portable memory sticks, CDs, DVDs and Blue-Ray discs. The research touches on a number of other questions, such as: how often do students revisit the contents once they’ve created them? Do they use digital archiving in the cloud? Do they create backups for the objects they have identified as important to preserve? This paper also contributes to identifying the specific criteria for the selection of digital information that will remain preserved for the future other than pure chance. The survey was conducted on undergraduate and graduate information science students from the Universities of Osijek, Zagreb and Zadar. Online questionnaire sent to said institutions and dispatched among information science students resulted in data that can be used in attempts to answer the above mentioned questions. Once the survey was closed, the gathered data was analysed using SPSS programme and used to draw conclusions regarding personal digital archiving practices and awareness among this population, along with other interesting findings this study brought up. Hana Marcetic Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Information Sciences Trg Svetog Trojstva 3 HR-31000 Osijek Croatia Revised version of paper that was presented on BOBCATSSS conference 2015.

We Created It, Now How Do We Save It? Issues in Preserving Personal Information, A Review

AbstractPreserving personal information is coming into focus in information science and archives. In recent years, professionals have been working to solve the many preservation challenges. This review analyzes the concepts associated with preserving and managing personal information, while identifying and discussing contributions made by scholars and practitioners who focus on personal digital archiving. The review considers current solutions to the problems.

Saving-Over, Over-Saving, and the Future Mess of Writers' Digital Archives: A Survey Report on the Personal Digital Archiving Practices of Emerging Writers

This article reports findings from a survey of 110 writers' personal digital archiving practices. The authors found that most writers neglect digital archival concerns, and consequently, their digital archives consist of poorly managed, highly distributed, and unsystematically labeled files. Writers are not entirely to blame for their neglect, however, as they develop archival practices idiosyncratically, with little or no guidance from information professionals, and 80% indicate they would welcome instruction on digital preservation. The authors recommend that archivists actively approach writers to offer guidance on the best and simplest ways to organize and archive their files so as to prevent further losses.

Highlighting the archives perspective in the personal digital archiving discussion

PurposeThe topic of personal archives has mainly been discussed by two research traditions in information science: archives and records management, and personal information management. The purpose of this paper is to compare a corpus of the archival literature written by the archival community with the concepts and challenges posed by Catherine Marshall, who exemplifies the personal information management approach. Many of the personal digital archiving challenges that Marshall identifies are related to discussions within the archival community.Design/methodology/approachIn order to demonstrate the similarities between Marshall's work with the archival discussion about personal archiving, Marshall's challenges, tasks and attributes of personal digital archiving were compared with a total of 33 articles from two library and information science databases.FindingsMany of the personal digital archiving challenges that Marshall identifies are related to discussions in the archival community. The author suggests that certain aspects of the archival literature may be utilized to address Marshall's identified challenges. Lastly, future collaborations between members of the archival community and members of the personal information management community may prove useful in addressing the challenges of personal digital archivingOriginality/valueThe paper demonstrates that two areas of information science share ideas about how to address the issues related to personal archives, but rarely consult one another when writing about personal digital archiving. The author highlights the archives and records management tradition in an attempt to introduce the literature to the broader discussion on personal digital archives being had by the personal information management tradition.

Highlighting the archives perspective in the personal digital archiving discussion

Highlighting the archives perspective in the personal digital archiving discussion

The personal curation of digital objects

PurposeThis paper aims to set out a coherent intellectual framework to help to better understand how people create, organise, manage, use and dispose of their personal digital archives. The context for this is the increasing volume and diversity of digital information objects being captured and stored by individuals in their personal capacities and the need to find ways to preserve this material for posterity.Design/methodology/approachThe research presented here is based on literature analysis, the questions having been informed by an earlier series of in‐depth interviews. The approach taken is to synthesise key concepts from the computer science, information management, and archives and records management literatures. Key concepts from the existing literature in computer science, information management, and archives and records management were elicited and synthesised to create a coherent document lifecycle narrative.FindingsIndividuals exhibit great diversity in terms of personal information management and digital archiving practice at just about every point in the digital information cycle: much more so than is the case in formal repositories. Practices exhibited are not always conducive to efficient document management. This represents a very keen challenge for professional curatorial practice.Practical implicationsLittle is known about how individuals manage digital information resources in their personal capacity, outside of their corporate or institutional employment. Yet both individuals on their own and professional curators on behalf of repositories are increasingly being faced with the challenge of how to deal with digital media. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to a growing debate in this area.Originality/valuePersonal information management from the perspective of personal digital archives is a surprisingly under‐researched area and the proposed model adopts an archival information lifecycle approach. It seeks to apply and promote an archivally‐oriented personal information management.

Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving, Part 1

Most of us engage in magical thinking when it comes to the long term fate of our digital belongings. This magical thinking may manifest itself in several ways: technological optimism (“JPEG is so common; why would it stop working?”), radical ephemeralism (“It’s like a fire: you just have to move on”), or simply a gap between principals and practice (“I don’t know why I never made a copy of those photos.”). At this point, a strategy that hinges on benign neglect and lots of copies seems to be the best we can hope for. For the last few years, with various collaborators, I have tried to understand the current state of personal digital archiving in practice with the aim of designing services for the long-term storage, preservation, and access of digital belongings. Our studies have not only confirmed that experienced computer users have accumulated a substantial amount of digital stuff that they care about, but also that they have already lost irreplaceable artifacts such as photos, creative efforts, research