• How to preserve the future’s past

    I have a session idea and was curious if others are interested in it. Here’s my pitch:

    We are all librarians now.

    Our combined desktops, laptops, and ereaders contain thousands of thousand of texts, images, and sounds that we have to pay some attention to if we expect them to exist and persist over the next five, ten, or fifteen years.  We can do this because those works are under our local control.

    But what of the texts, images, and videos that we contribute to sites like Twitter and Facebook?  These are readily available in the moment, but only weeks later they are increasingly difficult to find again and retrieve.  What about the years of own correspondence that are hosted on institutional email servers?  What about that amazing  website that we bookmarked 3 years ago, but has disappeared sometime since then?  Should we accept that our work is just a sand mandala?

    I’m interested in learning more about the tools and approaches related to personal archiving.  I was hoping we could share our own strategies that work and help each other around the roadblocks that stop us from  capturing, preserving and re-using the digital artifacts and interesting detritus of our lives.

2 Comments


  1. Kim Martin says:

    Hi Mita,

    I think this is a really interesting idea. I gave a workshop here at FIMS last summer on Ebooks and was surprised that hardly anyone had heard of Zotero or Mendeley, let alone thought of having any kind of personal archive.

    I would very happily participate in this session!

    Kim

  2. akriesberg says:

    This looks like a session I could get into…starting with personal archiving practice (which is a hobby horse of NDIIPP right now) and expanding it to a larger discussion of preservation outside of the traditional “digital preservation” space…

Leave a comment