Personal Archiving: Awareness and Events
Until recently, the field of Web archiving has largely been focused on preserving Web-based government information and content surrounding historical events. The issues faced early-on by national libraries and research institutions are now making their way into the mainstream as people begin to realize how their personal memorabilia has been dispersed across the Web. People are facing privacy, ownership, inheritance and preservation issues as photos go directly from memory cards to Flickr, Facebook or other social media sites.
In conjunction with the American Library Association’s National Preservation Week (http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/preswk/index.cfm), the Library of Congress is hosting an on-site Personal Archiving Day (http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/events/presweek2010/) event on Monday May 10th. The issues to be covered at this event are addressed on LC’s Personal Archiving: Preserving Your Digital Memories page.
An earlier Personal Archiving Conference(http://www.personalarchiving.com/conference/) was hosted by the Internet Archive in February with participation from the California Digital Library and the UC Berkeley School of Information. Topics included the preservation of home movies, and how genealogy research services are beginning to crowd-source the collection of historical family records from materials scanned and contributed by individuals. Selected presentation slides for February’s session are available on the conference page.
I will follow up if slides or video from Monday’s Library of Congress session are made available; this is a topic we will be hearing more about!