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Personal Archiving

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Intellectual Control
Personal Reference
Legacy
Cultural Record �

Why is personal archiving important?

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�

Make three copies, have at least two of them on two different types of media, and keep one copy in a different location from where you live.

Three, Two, One Rule

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Marshall 2008

There are four main challenges to archiving digital material.

Accumulation: We can capture and produce digital things more easily than physical. So it piles up, and we wait for something like our computer crashing to get rid of it all for us.

Distribution: I’ve got a computer, a phone, various USBs, and stuff on about 7 different websites. The more places where you store things, the harder it is to steward it all.

Curation- This basically means what you choose to save. This goes back to the accumulation issue- people aren’t choosing very much, they’re just creating.

Long-term access- Will the picture you take today be there 5 years from now? 10? Does anyone remember Word Perfect files? VHS tapes? Live Journals? We assume things are going to last because they are important to us, but that’s just not reality.

[check marks appear] Facebook helps us with the problem of distribution because we’re centralizing our personal photos, videos, and thoughts on the website. It also helps us with curation because we are forced to make deliberate decisions about what we upload and share.

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Metadata describes data.

Metadata

Fun Fact:

The most popular formats for digital photography are JPEG and TIFF, a tagged image format.

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PROS

CONS

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If you’re not comfortable with html, print each html file as a pdf when it’s open in the browser. Save these files in the same folder as your html pages. [show how to do this] ● You’ll notice that Facebook re-names everything you upload with a unique number. Delete and rename your files obviously and consistently [show example]. You’ll also need to add tags such as people in the photo, keywords, etc, and assign dates. ● Right now you all have your archive on your laptop. Once you’ve done all of the descriptive work, you should make a copy and keep that somewhere else- on the cloud, on an external hard drive, etc. ● Lastly, if you don’t already, you should decide what you want to have happen to your profile in the case of your death. You can assign someone to inherit and manage your profile, or you can decide to have your account deleted. Go to Security Settings > Legacy Contact to do this

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There’s some things you can start doing from now on to mitigate where Facebook fails as an archival tool. ● First, use your comment features to add descriptions, dates and tags! We’ve seen that these get saved! ● Second, don’t let Facebook be the only place you save. If you have really precious photos and video, save an original (noncompressed) copy locally as well. Maybe you can create a folder in your Facebook archive for these so it’s easy to keep track of them. ● Now that you understand the terms of use, don’ t upload anything that you don’t want Facebook to re-use! That means anything that would be a security risk, that might be embarrassing, or perhaps anything that you want to have complete control over because you want to sell it. ● Lastly- and this is so important - download your archive every year. Explore it and see what’s changed. Review the terms. Update your archive with new material

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References:

Bushey, J. 2015. “How Online Sociality and Free Terabytes are Shaping Personal Digital Archives.” Presentation at Personal Digital Archiving Conference (PDA), New York University, NY. April 24-26. <https://ia800307.us.archive.org/12/items/BusheyPDA2015V.2_201505/Bushey-PDA2015-v.2.pdf>

DACS. 2015. “Social Media: Understanding the Terms and Conditions.” Knowledge Base Fact Sheets. Accessed on October 8th, 2015. <http://www.dacs.org.uk/knowledge-base/factsheets/understanding-social-media-terms-and-conditions>

D.C. Public Library Special Collections, [Joseph Owen Curtis Collection] <http://digdc.dclibrary.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16808coll6/id/8/rec/17>

D.C. Public Library Special Collections, [Joseph Owen Curtis Collection] <http://digdc.dclibrary.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p16808coll6/id/229/rec/64>

D.C. Public Library Special Collections, [Joseph Owen Curtis Collection] <http://digdc.dclibrary.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16808coll6/id/47/rec/77>

Marshall, C. 2008. “Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving Part 2,” D-Lib Magazine 14 no. ¾ (March/ April 2008). <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/marshall/03marshall-pt2.html>

Massey, A. 2015. “Broken Links,” Aeon. Accessed on October 8th, 2015. <http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/what-gets-lost-if-the-net-forgets/>

Swanson, A. 2015. “What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like,” Washington Post Wonkblog (October 4th, 2015). <http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/04/what-people-in-1900-thought-the-year-2000-would-look-like/>