The Pittsburgh Project researchers focused on defining the functional requirements for recordkeeping in a corporate context, and developing means to satisfy them through a blend of policy, system design and implementation strategies that would enable compliance with emerging standards for ‘business acceptable communications’ (records). Part of their brief, particularly associated with the research of Wendy Duff, has been to discover the ‘literary warrant’ for the functional requirements—specifically to determine whether the credibility of particular functional requirements can be established by reference to authoritative sources such as the law, and the standards and best practices of related professionals, for example lawyers, auditors and information technologists, as codified in their literature.1 This article explores the nature of personal recordkeeping and broad social mandates for its role in witnessing to individual lives, and constituting part of society's collective memory and cultural identity. It posits that social mandates for personal recordkeeping may be found in sociology and in creative and reflective writing, and provides some examples of how the ‘urge to witness’, the ‘instinct to account for ourselves’, the need to leave behind ‘the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories’, are represented there. It also considers a range of personal recordkeeping behaviours and the role archivists play in carrying a personal archive beyond the boundaries of an individual life and into the collective archives—how evidence of me becomes evidence of us.This article was originally published in Archives and Manuscripts; the kindness of the editor and the author in allowing it to be republished here is acknowledged.This is a refereed article.A kind of witnessing…Keep them, burn them—they are evidence of me. (Matthew Pearce, nineteenth century surveyor and amateur geologist, referring to his notebooks, in Graham Swift's Ever after, Picador, London, 1992, p52.)2They spent long hours together over little meals she prepared and talked about life and love and literature, assuring each other how wise they were. Now that he's moved back to Europe he writes her frequent letters, making her a witness to his life…(Edmund White, ‘Straight women, gay men’ (1991) in The burning library: writings on art, politics and sexuality 1969–1993, Picador, London, 1995, p.313.)