Brianna H. Marshall - The Complete Guide to Personal Digital Archiving

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BRIANNA MARSHALL is director of research services at the University of California, Riverside. Previously, she was digital curation coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds master of library science and master of information science degrees from the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing.

2018 by the American Library Association

Extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of the information in this book; however, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

ISBNs

978-0-8389-1605-6 (paper)

978-0-8389-1683-4 (PDF)

978-0-8389-1682-7 (ePub)

978-0-8389-1684-1 (Kindle)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marshall, Brianna H., editor.

Title: The complete guide to personal digital archiving / edited by Brianna H. Marshall.

Description: First edition. | Chicago : ALA Editions, an imprint of the American Library Association, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and .

Identifiers: LCCN 2017031643 | ISBN 9780838916056 (softcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780838916827 (ePub) | ISBN 9780838916834 (PDF) | ISBN 9780838916841 (kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: Personal archivesManagement. | Electronic recordsManagement. | Archival materialsDigitization. | Archival materialsDigitizationStudy and teaching. | Digital preservation. | Digital preservationStudy and teaching. | Data curation in libraries. | Data curation in librariesUnited StatesCase studies.

Classification: LCC CD977 .C655 2018 | DDC 025.1/97dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031643

BY BRIANNA H. MARSHALL

BY CHELSEA GUNN

PART I
LEARNING ABOUT PERSONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVES BEST PRACTICES

BY SARAH SEVERSON

BY MELODY CONDRON

BY CAMERON COOK

BY YVONNE NG

Quick Recipes for Archiving Your Personal Digital Life

BY JAMIE WITTENBERG AND CELIA EMMELHAINZ

PART II
PERSONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVES AND PUBLIC AND COMMUNITY AUDIENCES

A Case Study

BY JAIME MEARS

BY NATALIE MILBRODT AND MAGGIE SCHREINER

The Plateau Peoples Web Portal at Washington State University

BY LOTUS NORTON-WISLA AND MICHAEL WYNNE

PART III
PERSONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVES AND ACADEMIC AUDIENCES

BY AMY BOCKO, JOANNA DIPASQUALE, RACHEL APPEL, AND SARAH WALDEN MCGOWAN

BY COLIN POST

BY SARA MANNHEIMER AND RYER BANTA

PART IV
SOCIAL AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF PERSONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVES

BY MATT SCHULTZ

BY ISAIAH BEARD

An Autoethnography of Digitally Archiving Black Millennialhood

BY CAMILLE THOMAS

Contemporary Mourning and Digital Estates

BY ANGELA GALVAN

BRIANNA H. MARSHALL, EDITOR

I FIRST BECAME INTERESTED IN DIGITAL ARCHIVING for purely personal reasons. From childhood on, I displayed the tendencies of an obsessive, legacy-oriented collector and organizer of cherished mementos. It started with my decision to catalog movie ticket stubs in elementary school. Years later when I got a cell phone, I meticulously hand-transcribed texts in a notebook, lamenting the lack of tools to automate this process. Witnessing the loss of years of family photos due to hard-drive failure was a wake-up call for me that things could and often did go wrong in the digital world. I couldnt avoid technology, so I might as well embrace it. As a teenager, I figured out how to transfer files from dusty floppy disks to recover long-forgotten poems and stories. In college, I tracked down photos dug out of relatives attics, digitized them, and tested workflows for storing and sharing these new digital images. It probably wasnt a surprise to anyone when I turned my organizational inclinations into a career and became a librarian.

In my first professional job, I was privy to all the trappings of a domain filled with information professionals: fancy scanners, metadata standards, and a frequent assumption of technical literacy. I found myself reciting best practices for data management to researchers and academicsoften just digital file management basics like file organization, naming conventions, and storage and backup tips, and I was continually floored by the immediate positive impact these practices could have. However, I also found myself increasingly concerned about my own (and to a broader extent my professions) ability to translate our rapidly developing standards into useful practices for the everyday user.

At home, I struggled through planning and executing my own digital archiving projects. I was all too aware of my own missteps, and was frequently guilt-ridden when I deflected from the supposed standards to speed things along. I felt mildly fraudulent, as if my credibility as an information professional would be revoked if anyone found out about the admittedly small ways I was cutting corners. I found similar frustrations and self-doubt reflected in my conversations with others, from family members to kindred spirits in the scrapbooking community. Almost everyone was overwhelmed, leaving abandoned projects in the wake of their procrastination.

It soon became apparent that managing digital information was the glue that bound my personal and professional life together. Suddenly, everywhere I looked people needed help wrangling their digital stuff! That realization was the impetus for this book. My hope is that it will help information professionals become not just informed but also excited to pass along critical skills so that users will have less painful and more fruitful journeys in personal digital archiving (PDA). I am convinced that sharing even simple principles for how to store, share, and preserve digital objects will benefit our users in both their personal and professional lives.

Personal digital archiving is relevant to information professionals, organizations, and institutions of all types. Empowering individuals often means enabling communities to document their experiences in new ways, potentially with the long-term outcome of this material making its way into an archive. As I reviewed the chapters in this book, I found myself inspired by the work that is underway. Information professionals in diverse roles are increasingly taking the mantle of personal digital archiving advocacy, developing new models for outreach, programming, and services.

There is still a lingering sense of the grassroots nature of PDA in libraries and archives, though year by year I am excited to see it being written about to a greater extent. This book joins excellent recent writing on PDA, including Donald Hawkinss Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage, Cal Lees I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era, and Melody Condrons Managing the Digital You. My favorite is perhaps the Library of Congresss Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving, an open-access electronic publication that includes a rich array of stories and narratives about PDA. I highly recommend these books and hope that this volume will be a useful addition to the existing literature.

From the outset, my intention has been for this book to be used as a primer for information professionals who arent quite sure how to approach personal digital archiving yet. I wanted the books chapters to feel informed yet personal, like anecdote-filled conversations with brilliant colleagues. The chapters are intentionally practitioner-focused so that after finishing this book, readers will feel ready to start conversations and make amazing things happen within their communities. Enjoy!