Announcing a Free “Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving” Publication

We are very excited to unveil our new e-publication, Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving! This is something new for us: a published compilation of selected blog posts published in The Signal. All of these posts are written by NDIIPP staff as well as guest bloggers from inside and outside the Library of Congress. This resource can serve as a primer for the digital archive novice, as well as a refresher for those with more experience.

The topic we have focused on here – personal digital archiving – is something that we have seen more and more interest in since we started this blog.  In addition to the challenges institutions face with preserving their large collections of digital material, individuals are also facing the same challenges.  The challenge is – how to preserve these valuable materials for the long term, more and more of which are in digital format?  The ease involved in creating all this personal digital “content” – whether it’s email, digital photographs, scanned documents, etc. – belies the fact that all digital material, whether in large amounts or small, is fragile.  This fragility can be due to software/hardware obsolescence, not being able to find the files, or even just physical damage.

For some time now, we have had a section on the NDIIPP website offering basic guidance on personal digital archiving. But since overall interest in this topic is growing, we responded to this with more and more posts on our blog.  Now that we have all this material, we wanted to make it even easier to navigate, so we gathered many of these posts together under one virtual cover.  This is meant to serve as a companion resource to the existing material on our website.

The content in Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving is grouped under three general headings:

• Personal Digital Archiving Guidance:  including tips for preserving digital photographs, personal archiving in the cloud, how to get your digital affairs in order, and others.
• Personal Reflections on Personal Digital Archiving:  tales of personal experience (either saving or losing digital material)
• Personal Digital Archiving Outreach:  reports of presentations, events and campaigns held both at the Library of Congress and elsewhere.

We hope this will be useful for everyone, no matter what stage you are in with your personal digital preservation.  Let us know what you think!