Saving What Matters

Archiving at the personal level is an important topic that is intricate and detailed, but can be simplified to a few important concepts. The most important concept is the medium is the archive. Understanding that at the personal level, people end up archiving information in the medium in which it was created.

Saving the Past by Organizing the Future

Media archiving is an important process at all levels of humanity. A girl might keep her first love letter from a high school sweetheart. Libraries archive old manuscripts to keep them in the best possible condition. The United States government is required by law to maintain records of correspondence in case they are needed. Photographers capture seminal moments in history through their lenses, and through archiving, generations to come are able to view the photos. There are a million reasons why somebody, somewhere wants to archive something. The desire and reasons to archive may not have changed much over the years, but the methods certainly have. Not all that long ago, the word digital never entered the same sentence as archive and now digital archiving is very much a leading method of archiving media.

Most government agencies have a strong grasp of digital archiving because they have trained professionals and policies in place to facilitate archiving important materials. Your average person, however, does not have a strong grasp on digital archiving. My research will center on digital archiving technology at the personal, consumer level. I anticipate my research to reveal that current archiving technology is poorly used and that the technology of the next 10 years will make archiving effortless. To develop this concept, the history of digital archiving will be studied and analyzed to see how the useability of archiving technology has changed over time. My research website will not only be a resource of historical and current information, but I also hope that it will provide practical advice on digital archiving technology.

I believe this research is important due the rapid pace with which our lives are being digitized. People tend to only archive in terms of the present, forgetting that technologies can become quickly outdated. Another pitfall of poor archiving technology and practice has nothing to do with physical replication, but the misplacement of data from insufficient meta data (Strodl, Motlik, Stadler, Rauber).  People need to know why they are archiving data in order for the archival system to work for their needs. Archiving isn’t just about storage, but just as important is retrieval (Kaye, Vertesi,  Avery, Dafoe, David, Onaga, Rosero, Pinch). Without a proper understanding of how technology can be used to preserve our digital information, I fear that media that should not be lost, will be.

References:

Kaye, J. ‘., Vertesi, J., Avery, S., Dafoe, A., David, S., Onaga, L., Rosero, I., and Pinch, T. 2006. To have and to hold: exploring the personal archive. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 – 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI ’06. ACM, New York, NY, 275-284. DOI= http://doi.acm.org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/10.1145/1124772.1124814

Strodl, S., Motlik, F., Stadler, K., and Rauber, A. 2008. Personal & soho archiving. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Pittsburgh PA, PA, USA, June 16 – 20, 2008). JCDL ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 115-123. DOI= http://doi.acm.org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/10.1145/1378889.1378910

My initial idea

I am very interested archiving and digital archiving in particular. Archiving as a topic is too large, so I am contemplating narrowing it to just image archiving, or perhaps some other more specific area of archiving. There seems to be a lot of research on this topic, so I feel good about finding enough resources for my paper. Digital archiving is constantly evolving and depends significantly on technology to do so.

What looks to be a good reference…

Strodl, S., Motlik, F., Stadler, K., and Rauber, A. 2008. Personal & soho archiving. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Pittsburgh PA, PA, USA, June 16 – 20, 2008). JCDL ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 115-123. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1378889.1378910

In this paper, the authors discuss archiving digital media for SOHOs (small office/home office). It was published in 2008 so it is recent and relevant to the concept of archiving digital media. Institutions like Universities and Governments are familiar with media archiving, but individuals often do not understand the importance of digital archiving.