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Keynotes and Program Set for Personal Digital Archiving 2013

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Are you concerned with saving your personal digital information, like your documents, emails, digital photos, home digital videos and social media accounts? If you haven’t given this a moment’s thought, rest assured. There is a community of interested individuals who are addressing the challenges and solutions of preserving personal digital archives.

Personal Digital Archiving 2013 will take place for the first time on the east coast on February 21 and 22 at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously hosted by the Internet Archive in San Francisco starting in 2010, the conference has been an excellent opportunity for digital preservation practitioners, scholars and individuals from different fields to share their current research on personal digital archiving topics.

Sally Bedell Smith at the 2012 National Book Festival, 28 Sept 2012, by Slowking4, on Wikimedia Commons
Sally Bedell Smith at the 2012 National Book Festival, 28 Sept 2012, by Slowking4 on Wikimedia Commons

The PDA2013 program will feature two engaging and lively keynote speakers.  The first day kicks off with an address by Sally Bedell Smith.  She’s the author of bestselling biographies of William S. Paley, Pamela Harriman, Princess Diana, John and Jacqueline Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1996, she previously worked at Time and The New York Times, where she was a cultural news reporter. Her latest biography, Elizabeth the Queen, won the 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for best book in history and biography, the only major book award decided by readers.

George A. Sanger at Blockparty 2008, by Jason Scott, on Wikimedia Commons
George A. Sanger at Blockparty 2008, by Jason Scott, on Wikimedia Commons

George Sanger, also known as “The Fat Man”, will start off the second day. He’s a composer of over 200 different computer and video games. His best-known works include The 7th Guest, Wing Commander, Hard Nova, Maniac Mansion (NES version), Loom and Tux Racer. Sanger leads the band Team Fat, which also includes fellow video game music composers Dave Govett, Joe McDermott and Kevin Weston Phelan. He created the first General MIDI soundtrack for a game, the first direct-to-MIDI live recording of musicians, the first redbook soundtrack included with the game as a separate disk, the first music for a game that was deemed a work of art, and the first soundtrack that was considered a selling point for the game.

The two-day conference will feature a diverse range of presentations on topics such as: institutional privacy and ownership rights issues around collecting and accessing personal digital archives; tools and techniques to process email archives; investigations of building, managing and archiving scholarly practices, artistic works and family history archives; and the challenges of saving online gaming experiences. The full list of papers, presentations and posters can be found here.

Interested in joining us? There is still space available (register here).  If you can’t attend in person, follow #pda2013 on Twitter.

PDA2013 is hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the University of Maryland Libraries, and the National Digital Information Infrastructure Program at the Library of Congress.

Comments (2)

  1. I wish funding were available to stream some of these conferences. My institution doesn’t have the money for me to travel, but I could ‘attend’ remotely. Having them streamed live perhaps in conjunction with a site like Creative Live would be most useful, and I’d be happy to pay a small fee to access the sessions.

  2. I agree with the comment of SWJenn, especially because I would like to attend remotely; not being able to attend in person (living in the Netherlands). My guess: many followers of the LoC live abroad 😉

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