There is a growing community of individuals who are interested in the preservation of personal digital information. Those individuals may include professionals working in libraries and archives who are receiving personal collections, scholars working with their own research materials and data, commercial companies working on consumer products to help people organize and save their digital content, and other people who create multitudes of personal digital content for various reasons. They come together annually to share practical solutions to preserving and archiving all types of personal digital content.
Personal Digital Archiving 2014 will be held at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis, Indiana, April 10-11, 2014. This is the first time the conference will be held in the Midwest. It was previously held San Francisco, California (2010-2012) and in College Park, Maryland (2013.)
The Personal Digital Archiving conference explores the intersections between individuals, public institutions, and private companies engaged in the creation, preservation, and ongoing use of the digital records of our daily lives. The conference reflects upon the current status of personal archiving, its achievements, challenges, issues, and needs as evidenced through research, education, case studies, practitioner experiences, best practices, the development of tools and services, storage options, curation, and economic sustainability. There is also interest in the role of libraries, archives and other cultural heritage organizations in supporting personal digital archiving through outreach or in conjunction with developing community history collections.
Some of the issues the conference committee is looking for the community to explore together are:
- How do we preserve the ability to access digital content over time when every app/community/network has a lifecycle that involves the end of its existence?
- How should libraries, museums and archives collect personal digital materials? How do we better share our knowledge and communicate about our work (including the failures as well as the successes)?
- How are archivists, curators, genealogists using born-digital and/or digitized material in their research?
- How can individuals be encouraged to undertake personal digital archiving activities?
- What are effective strategies and best practices for personal digital archiving in social media and ecommerce settings?
- What tools and services now exist to help with personal archiving? What do we need to make the process easier or more effective?
If you’re working with personal digital archives, please consider sharing your work at PDA2014. The call for proposals is open and the submission deadline is December 2.
For those interested in attending, registration will open early in the new year on February 1, 2014.
PDA2014 is sponsored by the Indiana State Library and NDIIPP, in collaboration with the Coalition for Networked Information.