The Sustainability of Everyday Stuff: a pragmatic look at personal digital archiving
Everyday artifacts--correspondence, journals, photos, records, home movies, and the like--are an important part of the historical record as well as essential to the emotional lives of individuals, families, and communities. Yet maintaining these ad hoc digital collections is proving to be difficult for a number of reasons: (1) the rate at which people accumulate digital content; (2) distributed storage and opportunistic content replication among devices and services; (3) the prevalence of benign neglect as a primary mode of stewardship; and (4) the ways in which retrieval from a long term store differs from Internet search and desktop retrieval.
Thus personal digital archiving can be boiled down to a set of simple questions: What should we keep? Where should we put it? How should we maintain it? Finally, how will we ever find it again? While the answers to these questions may seem self-evident--we should keep everything and put it somewhere safe, using the techniques and best practices developed by libraries and cultural heritage institutions--it seems worthwhile to give them more careful scrutiny as we gain experience living in a digital era. I will present some empirical evidence that illustrates these challenges, and will explore their implications for personal information management technologies.
Bio
Cathy Marshall is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley Laboratory. She was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC and is an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. Cathy has delivered keynotes at WWW, Hypertext, Usenix FAST, CNI, VALA, ACH-ALLC, and a variety of other CS and LIS venues. She is the author of a soon-to-be-released book, Reading and Writing the Electronic Book. At Cathy's homepage you will find her publications, blog, contact information, and will learn why she was not invited to her high school reunion.