Picturing the Democratization of Digital Stewardship

When we first started promoting personal archiving on our website a couple of years ago, the topics was fairly new. The efforts of major institutions to preserve and make available digital content were well-known, of course, but the idea of doing something similar for personal material was embryonic. Since then, attention to what can be called the democratization of digital stewardship has grown steadily. Many smaller organizations, as well as many individuals, are more attuned to the value of digital content to communities and to families.

I could provide a list here of projects underway–which is a good idea, and I’ll do it at some point–but a simpler way to make the case is to point out some recent public pictures tagged with personal digital archiving. Even in cases where the author offers up an attitude of  “look at all this junk,” these pictures are informative and poignant.