Vanessa Reyes - Saving Your Digital Past, Present, and Future: A Step-By-Step Guide

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For my husband, John Herridge, and daughter,

Lucy Marie Herridge.

The digital era has reshaped the nature, scope, and use of personal information. People collect and store an ever-increasing volume of digital personal information on convenient portable devices and create substantial amounts of personal textual and visual digital information on their personal computers. Computer users have become accustomed to using a variety of tools that involve their interactive social activities. Because of social media, there is a large amount of user-generated content related to peoples livesand no way for creators to save it all. This phenomenon could result in a massive gap in our current history because invaluable information may be lost. So it is helpful to find out as much as possible about how to manage personal digital information.

Saving Our Digital Past, Present, and Future: A Step-by-Step Guide is an introduction to personal information management (PIM). It is intended for a general audience, and the books premise is that everyone needs to manage their digital information. Ill introduce you to the kinds of tools people most commonly use today to manage their PIM, while considering the pros and cons of each. In addition, Ill provide visual and textual examples that illustrate how to use best practices to ensure the longevity of information, while considering current solutions to the problems associated with personal information loss.

This book begins by explaining what personal information management is and how to identify your personal information space and processes. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the specific daily PIM processes, such as receiving, generating, keeping, using, and organizing personal digital information. Chapter 3 covers the importance of changing PIM behaviors to better understand why we acquire and accumulate personal information. It also includes a step-by-step approach on how to maintain out-of-date material and perform a digital cleansingdeleting all your unwanted personal digital information. Chapter 4 examines the problem of losing personal digital collections and discusses the many ways you can prevent accidentally deleting your information. It also examines the cost of managing personal information for the long term while addressing the challenges associated with losing it all. Chapter 5 highlights some do-it-yourself PIM tools of the future and compares newer systems to the traditional ones most people are accustomed to using. The chapter covers these tools and their unique functions and provides pointers about what to consider when shopping for digital cloud storage. Chapter 6 examines how to save it all and provides step-by-step techniques for the recovery and loss prevention of personal digital information. Finally, chapter 7 explores the future of personal digital collections and discusses how to maintain your personal digital life by creating a digital estate plan. By doing this, you can avoid digital foreclosurelosing it all.

With my experience in the digital and archival technology fields, I have learned firsthand why its important to save my personal information for the long term. I now get great satisfaction in sharing with others how to go through this process. I hope that this book guides you through this precious endeavor and helps answer your questions with regard to managing your personal digital life.

This book draws from my own research in personal information management and was influenced by the everyday process of managing your digital life. The idea came from discussing my interest in this area with my dissertation advisor, mentor, and friend, Dean Michele V. Cloonan. Michele guided me through my doctoral research and allowed me to learn through her own experiences with research and publishing. I am thankful for her guidance, as it shaped my understanding of the field of preservation and how vital it is to maintain our personal digital lives. My editor at Rowman & Littlefield, Charles Harmon, helped me realize the utility of a book that addresses how we manage our personal digital lives by taking a step-by-step approach, and for this I am grateful. I learned so much in the process of gathering all the standards I have researched and taught my students about through the years. In my discussions with Charles, I gained a sense of how important it is to take the time to evaluate how we see our digital lives and what it is that we need to do to sustain them. Thus, this book was born.

A special thanks to Michelle Asakawa, to whom Charles introduced me. She has guided me on the writing process and taught me how to speak to the reader through text. Her gifted editorial skills allowed me to forego my more academic tone for one that can be understood by a general audience.

I could not have written this book without the support of my husband, John Herridge, who I thank profusely. On busy nights when I found myself grading my students papers and writing this book, he was there for meand for our daughter Lucy, who was about six months old when I started the writing process. He has been a wonderful cheerleader and supporter throughout. I want to also thank my parents, Iliana and Ricardo Reyes, who called me every day to ask how I was doing and to make sure I was doing nothing else but focusing on this book. I am grateful to them for teaching me the value of hard work and never giving up on my dreams.