Personal Archiving

The DPOE Baseline Digital Preservation Curriculum consists of six easily understandable topics.

- Identify . . . the types of digital content you have.
- Select . . . what portion of your digital content will be preserved.
- Store . . . your selected content for the long term.
- Protect . . . your content from everyday threats and emergency contingencies.
- Manage . . . and implement requirements for long term management.
- Provide . . . access to digital content over time.

The annual Personal Digital Archiving conference is about preserving any digital collection that falls outside the purview of large cultural institutions. Considering the expanding range of interests at each subsequent PDA conference, the meaning of the word “personal” has become thinly stretched to cover topics such as family history, community history, genealogy and digital humanities.

Personal Digital Archiving 2015 was held in New York City April 24-25, 2015.
The presentations from this meeting are now available at the conference web site, where they are linked to the individual day agendas, at:

http://personaldigitalarchiving.com/program/

Video from the sessions can be found at the Internet Archive, at

https://archive.org/details/PDA2015

As is the case with most archivists dealing with born-digital stuff, the challenge is that you can’t just look at the stuff to assess its value. Just to look at the file directory, you basically have to rescue it first and then decide if it was worth it.
http://hangingtogether.org/?p=5321&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed...(hangingtogether.org)

Taking time each year to go through your digital files and decide what to keep and what to delete can be easier if you do it during Preservation Week. Check for programs, workshops, and activities happening in your local area. In 2016, Preservation Week will be April 24-30 and is usually the last week in April.

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.
Introduction

Many of us now document our lives digitally. As these collections grow, so do the challenges involved in their management, preservation and use. Creators must actively manage their files, and collecting institutions must adapt their processes to accommodate personal digital materials.

This conference focuses on many topics relevant to personal digital archiving. It will provide information useful for libraries, archives and museums, as well as individuals, community groups, activist groups and others interested in personal digital collections.

Re-inventing the scholarly record: taking inspiration from Renaissance Florence

On February 11th, we presented the Evolving Scholarly Record (ESR) Framework at the EMEA Regional Council annual meeting, in Florence. The topic was on spot, as the plenary talks preceding the ESR break-out session had paved the way for a more in-depth discussion of how libraries can re-invent their future stewardship roles in the digital domain.

In the flow of information all around us – in businesses, governments, personal spaces, in the physical and online world, there is information that we want to fix at a point in time and give it an identifier that we know we can use to find it again. That is, be kept in a way so that it remains not only identifiable with a meaningful name, but also so it is inviolate and trustworthy over time. The information might be born digital (emails, datasets, web pages, tweets, PDF documents), digitised copies of physical formats (books, paper documents) or still in physical form only.

Many archives hold born-digital content on numerous types of antiquated media and in obsolete formats but lack the equipment or expertise to transfer it into a form that can be more easily managed for processing, preservation, and access.