Annotated Bibliography
This article is a commentary on current research and emerging services for personal digital libraries and collections. The author defines personal digital collections as informal, diverse and expanding collections that are accumulated and maintained by an individual. This includes emails, documents, digital images, audio and video recordings. The article looks at long-term management of digital materials and how this differs from its analog equivalents. It explores issues that personal digital collections present for individuals such as obsolete formats and media, data loss, backups, privacy protection, and access control.
Barratt, N. (2009). From memory to digital record: Personal heritage and archive use in the twenty-first century. Records Management Journal, 19(1), 8-15.
This article comments on trends in archiving, examines the impact of the internet on archives and archiving activity, and looks at applications that could be used to match these trends. The author writes their personal observations based on their own experience as a trained historian and former archive employee. The author found that the internet introduces new challenges to archivists and historians and provides opportunities for historians and archivists to embrace user trends and evolve their roles. The author predicts that the role of historians will evolve to include the interpretation of user generated evidence that emerges on the internet. The role of archivists is predicted to include the interpretation and organization of mass information being published and disseminated online as documents become increasingly digital.
Cushing, A.L. (2010). Highlighting the archives perspective in the personal digital archiving discussion. Library Hi Tech, 28(2), 301-312. Doi: 10.1108/07378831011047695
The purpose of the article is to compare archival literature from Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) and Wilson’s Library Literature and Information Science to literature from Catherine Marshall, who is notable for her personal information management approach. The author seeks to demonstrate the similarities between Marshall’s work and archival literature about personal archiving. Marshall suggests that there are unique challenges and problems associated with personal digital archiving that require a different approach than traditional archival techniques. The author found that many of the personal digital archiving challenges that Marshall identified can be addressed by archival literature. The author suggests that collaboration between members of the archival community and members of the personal information management (PIM) community would be useful for addressing challenges of personal digital archiving.
Hawkins, D. T. (Ed.). (2013). Personal archiving: Preserving our digital heritage. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today, Inc. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=3316168
This book is a compilation of essays on the field of personal digital archiving that explores topics from digitization, collection, preservation, to the presentation of personal archives. The chapters examine issues such as digital inheritance, email archives, social media and personal data, and software and services for personal archives. The book concludes by looking at the future of personal digital archiving based on technological trends, including the nature of personal digital archives, how people think about these collection of records, and how this will change over time.
Hobbs, C. (2001). Personal archives: The character of personal archives: Reflections on the value of records of individuals. Archivaria, (52), 126-135.
This article examines the character of personal archives and looks at the acquisition and appraisal of personal records compared to government or administrative records. The author worked with the Literary Manuscript Collection at the National Library, working mostly with personal fonds from poets, novelists, and playwrights. In doing this work, the author noted an emphasis on government and administrative records in mainstream archival theory as opposed to personal records. It is the author's findings that personal archives require a different appraisal approach than administrative or government records. Personal archives do not reflect formal activity or have systemic organization. Instead, they contain intimate and personal life experiences. The personal nature of these records affects how archivists interact with the creator or donor during appraisal, acquisition, and management of records. The author advocates for archival theory to elaborate on the unique character of personal archives.
Kunda, S., & Anderson-Wilk, M. (2011). Community stories and institutional stewardship: Digital curation’s dual roles of story creation
and resource preservation. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 11(4), 895–914.
This article presents a model for digital curation that addresses the challenges of digital preservation and community engagement that come with the rise of Web 2.0 and social computing. A literature review in the areas of understanding science (knowledge creation, science communication), museum studies (curation, exhibition), and library science (digital preservation, institutional repositories) informed the creation of a conceptual model for digital curation, which the authors calls the Stories and Stewardship Digital Curation Model. This model provides a framework for institutions to collaborate with communities to develop web spaces that can be used for stewardship and to meet the needs and interests of the community. These web spaces would allow community members to contribute stories, see themselves represented, and access archival material.
Kunze, J., Littman, J., Madden, E., & Adams, C. (2018). The BagIt File Packing Format (V1.0). Retrieved October 31, 2018, from
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8493
This report provides an overview to using the BagIt file packaging format, which is used for transferring and storing digital content. BagIt formatted packages are called "Bags," which are structured directories with metadata in the Bag's content such as file manifests, checksums, and payload size. The report covers organizing your Bags, using Bag metadata, getting started with BagIt, and transferring your Bags to another party. The authors also provide additional resources on BagIt.
Marshall, C. C. (2008). Rethinking personal digital archiving, Part 1: Four challenges from the field. D-Lib Magazine, 14(3/4).
https://doi.org/10.1045/march2008-marshall-pt1
This article explores the long term storage, maintenance and access of personal digital records. This article is informed by five previous studies and informal observations collected over time (Marshall et al., 2006; Marshall et al., 2007; Marshall, 2007; Marshall, 2008; McCown et al., 2008). Most of the participants of these studies are not computer experts. The author interviewed professional computer science researchers to compare the results to that of the previous studies. The author found that concerns among both groups of participants were similar with small variance.
National Museum of American History. (2010, November 8). You asked, we answer: Taking care of your own archives [Blog]. Retrieved June 5, 2018, from http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2010/11/you-asked-we-answered-taking-care-of-your-own-archives.html
In this blog post, Smithsonian Institutional Archives (SIA) experts Nora Lockshin, SIA’s Paper Conservator, and Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, SIA’s Electronic Archivist , respond to questions about personal archives. This blog post highlights questions that came out of a Q&A session that was hosted by the main Smithsonian Facebook page. It covers issues such as safely removing photographs from an album, preserving moldy documents, storing photographs and family papers, digitizing analog photographs, and appropriate file format and resolution.
Wakim, Z. (2017, April 25). Thoughts on personal digital archiving 2017 [Blog]. Retrieved February 18, 2018, from
https://blog.getkumbu.com/posts/thoughts-on-personal-digital-archiving-2017
This blog posts summarizes the author's main takeaway from the Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) conference by Stanford University Libraries in 2017. It covers topics such as what can be perceived as "personal," issues with digital content, and creative thinking required for curating born digital content. The author used the conference as an opportunity to learn and reflect on the nature of personal digital archiving and showcase Kumbo, which was created to archive digital memories.
Williams, P., John, J. L., & Rowland, I. (2009). The personal curation of digital objects: A lifecycle approach. Aslib Proceedings;
Bradford, 61(4), 340–363. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00012530910973767
This article looks at personal information management to establish an intellectual framework for understanding users' digital behaviour. This article provides a synthesized literature analysis to identify key issues in computer science, personal information management, and archives and records management. The questions in this article are informed by a series of in-depth interviews completed in an earlier study (Williams et al., 2008). The authors found that individuals are diverse in their personal information management and digital archiving practices and that these practices are not conducive to efficient document management.