Cathy Marshall
Microsoft

Avoiding a Personal Digital Dark Ages: toward an adaptive service for
personal archiving

Most of us engage in magical thinking when it comes to the long term
fate of our personal digital belongings. This magical thinking may
manifest itself in several ways: technological optimism ("I know
there'll be a solution when I want to look at those files again"),
radical ephemeralism ("It's like a fire: you just have to move on"), or
simply a gap between principles and practice ("I know I should move my
files off of those zip disks, but I'm real busy right now").

Last year, some colleagues and I conducted a field study to understand
the current state of personal digital archiving in practice. We sought
to identify archiving challenges stemming not only from emergent
technologies, but also from the exigencies introduced by home computer
use and the genres and collections of digital materials that people
value. I will talk about the results of this study and go on to describe
its implications for the design of a Web service model for the long-term
storage and access of personally meaningful digital artifacts. In so
doing, I will examine how personal archiving needs intersect with
larger-scale digital archiving technologies such as institutional
repositories and implementations of specific preservation strategies,
policies, and practices.