Perspectives

on

Personal Digital Archiving

National Digital Infor mation

Infr astructur e and Pr eservation Progr a m

Libr ary of Congr ess

2013
Contents

Introduction

Personal Digital Archiving Guidance

Four Easy Tips for Preserving Your Digital Photographs 6

Mission Possible: An Easy Way to Add Descriptions to Digital 

Photos 8

Photo Sharing Sites as Digital Preservation Tools 12

Digital Preservation-Friendly File Formats for Scanned Images 14

Archiving Cell Phone Text Messages 16

What Image Resolution Should I Use? 18

Personal Archiving in the Cloud 21

Family History and Digital Preservation 23

The Big Digital Sleep 26

When I Go Away: Getting Your Digital Affairs in Order 29

Personal Reflections on Personal Digital Archiving

Confessions of an Imperfect Personal Digital Archivist 32

One Family’s Personal Digital Archives Project 34

My Weekend Project 37

Personal Archiving – Year End Boot Camp 39

“It’s Dead, Jim”: Resurrecting an Obsolete File 42

The Results of One Scholar’s Survey: What Are Your Plans for 

Your Personal Digital Archives? 46

Have Obsolete Digital Media, Will Travel 49

Forestalling Personal Digital Doom 51

Remember When We had Photographs? 53

When Data Loss is Personal 55

Personal Digital Archiving Outreach

Hey Libraries and Archives: Personal Digital Archiving Kit Now 

Available 58

Pass it On: Library of Congress Events for Preservation Week 2012

59

Librarians Helping Their Communities with Personal Digital Ar- chiving 61

Preserving Your Personal Digital Photographs: Library of Congress 

Presents Online Session 64

ALCTS, PLA and Library of Congress Collaborate on Personal 

Digital Archiving Campaign 65

We Talked and Talked About Personal Digital Archiving 67
Save Our African American Treasures: Houston and Dallas 68

Personal Digital Archiving: An Interview with Jordan Fields of the 

Kansas City Public Library 71

What Do Teenagers Know About Digital Preservation? Actually, 

More Than You Think... 73

From Chaos to Order: Diverse Communities Interested in Personal 

Digital Archiving Resources 75

The Challenge of Teaching Personal Archiving 76

About the Authors
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Introduction

Imagine someone 50 years from now who wishes to study our life in the 

early twenty-first century. Getting any kind of reasonable understanding will 

require using born-digital sources: websites, email, digital photographs and a 

host of other material that exist only in electronic form.

This means we have to preserve lots of digital information for a long 

time. Doing this work is, however, fundamentally different that preserving 

books, papers and other traditional forms of information. Digital content 

can be hard to capture, difficult to organize and use and prone to going 

obsolete due to changing technology.

The Library of Congress is attending to its digital holdings to ensure 

that they remain available over time. This is a critical responsibility for a 

collecting organization, and requires a good deal of careful planning and 

attention. Acting now, and continuing to act tomorrow, is essential if digital 

materials are to carry memories into the future.

The same is true for individuals and families who want to pass on 

their personal digital memories. One of the still unfolding impacts 

of the computer age is that everyone now must be their own digital 

archivist. Without some focused attention, any personal collection is at high 

risk of loss – and quick loss at that.

Through its national digital preservation program, the Library of Congress 

aims to build awareness of the personal digital archiving challenge. We first 

offered tips on managing personal digital materials on our website, digitalpreservation.gov, in 2007. At the time, there was little guidance available 

on the subject, and we wanted to help people with some basic advice.

This advice has evolved over the years and we now have a broad range of 

information available. Our approach has always been to provide what we 

think of as high-level, basic guidance that gives the non-specialist some ideas 

for getting started. We find that most people have practically no experience 

with or understanding of practices to manage digital content. Their biggest 

need is for an accessible introduction and some simple first steps. Our major 

task , then, is broad public engagement. We aim to reach people directly, and 

also work to help other cultural heritage organizations build their own public 

outreach programs.

Our digital preservation blog, The Signal, is a major outlet for addressing 

personal digital archiving. Over the last two years, the blog has featured 

three categories of stories on the topic:
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• Discussions about applying the guidance listed in the 

Preserving Your Digital Memories section of our website.

• Narratives about real-world encounters with personal digital 

preservation issues.

• Descriptions of the outreach we have undertaken to connect 

with institutions and individuals to promote personal digital 

archiving.

We have gathered the most useful posts in each of these categories into this 

electronic publication. Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving is intended 

as resource for individuals – and the institutions that serve them – to meet 

a critical challenge. Our aim is for it to be a primer for the digital archive 

novice, as well as a refresher for those with more experience.

Each entry has a link in the title back to the original post on our blog. The 

original posts include pictures and graphics. We have made some minor 

edits here in cases where the original language referred to illustrations or was 

otherwise more suited to interactive content.

We believe this compilation is best used in tandem with our other digital 

preservation resources. These include our website and our blog, as well 

as our Twitter account, @ndiipp, and our Facebook page. We also have 

a diverse assortment of videos available through YouTube. Our monthly 

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is available by free email 

subscription.

All these sources offer a regular stream of current details with a bearing on 

personal digital archiving. We also aim to engage with people through all 

our communication channels. A key measure of how well we are doing is 

tied to the comments and other responses we get from our readers. We are 

eager to know what you think and to hear your ideas for how we can do 

better.

This resource is possible because of the fine team at the Library of Congress 

and wonderful guest bloggers from other places. For details on all, please 

see the About the Authors section. Special thanks to Tess Webre for her 

invaluable help as a compiler and formatter.

Bill LeFurgy, March 2013
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Personal Digital Archiving Guidance
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Four Easy Tips for Preserving Your Digital Photographs

Butch Lazorchak

Like many of you, I’ve got hundreds (thousands?) of photos. One of my 

favorites is of me doing an improvised kung-fu move – not the most flattering 

photo in my collection, but it was taken by a good friend back when I was 

still a crazy grad student and I crack up every time I see it.

Of course, the photo is only in digital form, which means it’s got a 

“preservation” problem.

Digital preservation is the set of management processes that ensure the 

long-term accessibility of digital information. At NDIIPP we deal with 

these issues on a grand scale, working to ensure the nation’s valuable digital 

cultural heritage survives for the long-term benefit of all.

But the valuable cultural heritage material we’re interested in often starts off 

as a lone artifact in someone’s personal collection.

That’s why we’ve been offering guidance on how you can preserve your own 

personal digital information. Not to say that there’s any long-term national 

interest in my photo, but you never know. In any event, it’s valuable to me 

and that’s enough for now.

We’ve come up with four simple steps to start you on the digital preservation 

path: Identify, Decide, Organize and Make Copies (I.D.O.M. anybody?).

Identify means to take an inventory of where you have pictures. Are 

they still on your camera? On your computer? Stored on a photo-sharing 

website? Identifying where your photos are located is the first step to getting 

a handle on preserving them.

Next, decide which photos are the most important. Digital photography 

makes it easier than ever to keep every picture you take, but that’s not 

always a good thing, especially if you’ve got similar pictures with only slight 

variations.

A smaller collection of really essential photographs is easier to maintain than 

a sprawling mish-mash of everything, so don’t be afraid to decide to toss some 

away if they aren’t important (a process known in the cultural heritage world 

as deaccessioning). If you do get rid of copies, make sure you keep the one 

with the highest resolution.

My photo is the only one I have from that time and place, so it’s about as 

essential as you can get. Luckily for me, the copy I have is at 300ppi (pixels 

per inch), which is a decent resolution for my purposes, including printing at 

its current size.

Next, organize the photos that you’ve selected. This is the most 

time-consuming part of the job (depending on how many photos you’ve got) 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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but will be well worth the effort for accessing the pictures in the future.

Give each photo a descriptive file name. My photo has the relatively 

nonsensical name “butch_dogg.jpg,” but I know exactly which picture it is 

when I scan through my directories.

You should also tag your photos with descriptive information to remind you 

of the “who, what and where” in the photo. There are a number of photo 

editing tools that can help you add tags to your photos. Additionally, most 

cameras add valuable information to your pictures automatically in the form 

of Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) data.

The EXIF data tells me the exact date my photo was taken, something I 

wouldn’t know otherwise.

Next, create a directory structure for your picture storage environment. You 

can organize your photos by year, location, person, or any other structure that 

makes sense to you.

My structure is a bit random. But that’s okay – I can work on this later!

Write a brief description of your directory structure and the photos in it and 

store it with the pictures.

Finally, make copies of your pictures and store them in different 

places. During the “identify” process you probably found pictures stored 

in a bunch of different places. This is good! That is, as long as you’ve got a 

system for keeping track of them.

How many copies? Well, more is certainly better, but the main things you 

want to do are make multiple copies; store them on different kinds of storage 

media (CDs, DVDs, USB flash drives, external hard drives or online storage); 

and store them as geographically dispersed from each other as possible.

I have a copy of my photo on my current laptop (having outlived four 

previous computers) and on online storage that I’ve maintained for more than 

seven years. Still, I could probably use another back-up just to be safe.

You should check your photos and storage media at least yearly to make sure 

that you can still get at them and to mitigate against hardware or software 

obsolescence.

I.D.O.M. – the easy way to save your stuff!
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Mission Possible: An Easy Way to Add Descriptions to

Digital Photos

Mike Ashenfelder

“I just want to use it; I don’t want to know how it works.” – Unknown

My Signal colleagues and I give out digital-preservation advice based on our 

research, our experiences and our understanding of best practices. We also 

pay attention to questions from the general public, with whom we interact 

at events such as the National Book Festival, Personal Archiving Day at the 

Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s Saving Our African American 

Treasures. By far, most of the questions we get asked are about digital photos 

and we expertly answer almost every question.

Almost.

Our main concern is for everyone to back up and care for their digital 

photos. But we’re also eager to explain the innards of digital photos. We talk 

about file formats and the effects of compression. We explain photo metadata 

and show EXIF examples. We’ve made an informational video about photo 

metadata, written about our NDIIPP project with the Stock Artists Alliance, 

and, as part of that project, interviewed photo metadata evangelist David 

Riecks.

Aside from encouraging people to back up their digital photos, we also push 

for them to add descriptions. That part is tricky.

We make the analogy that adding a description to a digital photo is like 

writing on the back of a paper photo. Honestly, writing on the back of a 

paper photo is a breeze by comparison. There is a simple question people ask 

us to which we don’t have a simple answer: “How?” Because it’s not easy. In 

fact, it’s much more difficult than it should be.

Photography professionals routinely use photo-editing software to add photo 

metadata to their digital photos for copyright and business reasons. To them, 

the process is simple, mainly because they’ve mastered it. As the saying goes, 

“The obvious is already known.” However, the process is challenging for a 

newcomer.

The steps are usually a variation on: starting the software, opening the photo, 

selecting the menu options File > Get Info and typing text into fields. To 

complicate matters though, the field names and terminology are maddeningly 

similar and possibly different from program to program. Is “caption” the 

same as “description”? Which fields should I use? Which fields equate to 

writing on the back of a paper photo? To further complicate the process, 

depending on the software, a description added to a photo might not actually 

get embedded into the photo file; it might be visible only with the software 

you used to embed the description. Our goal is to embed the description 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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so that it always remains stored in the photo file, no matter where the photo 

goes or what you view the photo on or with.

The larger problem is not so much with the photo-editing software. The 

problem is requiring people to use photo-editing software at all to add 

descriptions.

Given the choice, most of us would not bother. Or we would put that chore 

at the end of our long list of chores. Library staff found from interactions 

with the public that it’s common for people to leave their photos on 

their smart phones or on SD cards, so requiring people to struggle with 

photo-editing software in order to add descriptions is not realistic.

The encouraging news is that it shouldn’t take much technologically to 

simplify the process, to maybe have a button on the camera that says, “Add 

Description.” Or a smart-phone app that has the same function. Click a 

button, display a Description field for the photo, type in text and you’re done.

David Riecks said that the idea is not new. “I raised this same argument 

at the first International Photo Metadata Conference in 2007,” said 

Riecks. Nothing came of it though, even though there were a group of 

engineers from major camera manufacturers in attendance. Riecks said 

that, still, it is up to the manufacturers to add this feature and make it 

interoperable with the current metadata schemas.

And if you send a digital photo to me into which you’ve added a description, 

I should be able to see that description as easily as I can see the title of a song 

playing on my smart phone. It’s just text embedded into a file.

Duraspace’s Michelle Kimpton made a somewhat-related point about how 

consumers will accept a new technology – in this case cloud storage – 

when technologists make it easy to use. She said, “These (cloud storage) 

technologies will become simple to use. And...when people see the value of 

cloud technology and that it’s drop-dead easy, then it will take off.”

The same could be said for an “Add Description” feature. People might be 

more inclined to add descriptions if it just takes the push of a button and a 

moment of typing. Of course, not everyone will add descriptions, just as not 

everyone writes descriptions on paper photos. But it’s nice to have the option.

The idea of enabling camera users to add descriptions via the camera is 

not new. Almost 100 years ago, a major camera manufacturer included 

an autographic feature on special cameras, enabling users to write captions 

on film. For whatever reason, that feature never became popular. Maybe 

because it was easier to write on the paper photo. But at least the company 

did develop the feature in response to a need.

Riecks points out that manufacturers react to what people voice and what 

the market expects, and manufacturers seek out suggestions for future 

improvements. He encourages people to consider contacting their camera’s 

manufacturer and simply asking for the feature. He has that contact 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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information, and more, listed on the photometadata.org blog.

At the Library of Congress, we encourage people to add descriptions to 

photo files as a good archival practice and we hope that camera manufactures 

will implement this feature soon so that all photo takers can easily add 

descriptions to their photos. As consumers and institutions accumulate 

photos and pass them along to others, those who receive the photos will 

appreciate the embedded information.

Modern digital cameras are amazing and getting better all the time.

Asking people to add descriptions to their digital photos is like asking them 

to write descriptions on back of their paper photos. Doing so (writing 

on paper photos) is a good practice but most people don’t do it, including 

me. It’s time consuming, you have to wait for the ink to dry until you 

can stack the photos and so on. But someday these descriptions may help 

jog your memory or help other viewers understand the content of the 

photos. (“Oh, that’s grandma when she was a teenager.”) Similarly, adding 

descriptions to digital photos – photo metadata – is a good practice but it is 

also a chore.

Mike Wash, the CIO of NARA, was an Kodak engineer for about 30 

years. While at Kodak, Wash was responsible for many of the automated 

developments that we take granted on cameras today, like autofocus, 

automatic light adjustment and technical metadata recording (such as the 

date and time the photo was taken and the light and shutter-speed settings).

I asked him if it was possible to have a feature on a digital camera that would 

enable users to easily add metadata. Wash said, “I think that nearly everyone 

would agree that some sort of data associated with an image is valuable. But 

the hardest part is going to be dealing with the variable nature of what type 

of information you would use. Creating an “all things to all people” type of 

one-touch metadata entry is going to be pretty hard.”

Wash added, though, that “documenting information about the photo” is 

one of the features his team of engineers at Kodak had on their list of unmet 

consumer needs. However, people will not want to allocate any time to the 

task of adding metadata; for example, typing a description into a camera or a 

smart phone would be awkward, time consuming and unappealing. “It has 

to be automatic,” Wash said. “Beyond easy.”

The idea that makes the most “beyond easy” sense is also a bit daring: 

voice-to-text software. With the photo displayed on your camera, you click 

a button or open an app, speak a few words about the photo into the device 

and the text of your words gets embedded into the photo file. Both Mike 

Wash and David Riecks support the idea.

Wash said, “Voice technology has improved a lot over the past few 

years. And that would easily translate into a low-cost feature.” Wash stressed 

that the cost threshold is crucial to public acceptance. He mentioned a 

feature of the Kodak Advantix system that didn’t get developed because the 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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budget to put it into a camera, at .25¢, was too much. Wash said, “You’re 

aiming for tenths of pennies here and there because all of that equates into 

less margin or too high a price to dissuade a consumer from buying your 

product.”

So we have the technological capability to add a voice-to-text photo metadata 

function to digital cameras, and we have a need to embed descriptions to 

our digital photos, but – for practical and economic reasons – it must be 

cost effective for manufactures to develop it. It is likely that once consumers 

know that it is possible and easy to do, and they see the value of added 

descriptions in helping organize and find their photos, the market will favor 

the camera manufacturers who make that feature available. In a short time it 

could become a standard feature.

One more word about Mike Wash’s support of adding descriptive 

information to photos. It’s not just an interesting “cocktail conversation” 

idea for him. He actually has two vintage 100-year-old Autographic 

cameras. One sits on his desk. Kodak built the Autographic to enable users 

to write descriptions onto photographic film. After you take a picture (using 

special Autographic film) you open a little door in the camera back and you 

can write a note that would come out between frames. Wash said, “You just 

hold the camera with the little window up to a bright light for five or ten 

seconds and close the door. And it actually exposes your metadata onto the 

film between the negatives. It’s pretty cool.”

Note: The original blog post featured a visual experiment involving the location 

of a description for a digital photograph. You are invited to do the experiment 

yourself by clicking on the title above, which takes you to the blog post.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Photo Sharing Sites as Digital Preservation Tools

Barry Wheeler

The numbers are staggering – an estimated 2.5 billion people in the world 

have digital cameras! They take perhaps 3.75 billion pictures each year. We 

love to share those pictures – hundreds of millions of pictures are uploaded to 

photo sharing sites each day! In addition to sharing, many people may wish 

to preserve their photographs for commercial, artistic, future family uses. We 

know that we should keep multiple copies of any photographs we wish to 

preserve, including at least one copy in an offsite location. So the question 

naturally arises – if we have uploaded those pictures can they be considered 

part of our digital preservation strategy?

We can’t recommend specific commercial products here, but in general, using 

a photo sharing site as a preservation copy repository has a lot of pluses. We 

may be selective uploading only our favorite images, and we may crop and 

process those images as we please. Online sites frequently have a variety 

of tools to name, describe and tag each picture. Previous chapters and the 

Library’s Personal Archiving page provide much advice that seems perfect for 

uploading images to a well-documented site. But, at least 3 major “ifs” are 

hurdles that must be overcome first. The following are some key issues to 

consider before choosing an online photo sharing site:

Is the online business stable, with a viable financial future?

This is a judgment call. No one can predict the future of an internet 

site. But at least two online photo sharing sites have gone out of business and 

a third changed its business model. In these three cases, many photographers 

lost all access to their images. They had from one to 14 days to retrieve their 

images – such brief periods that many photographers were unaware of the 

problem before the site was gone. The photographers then have no recourse; 

all online sites appear to include a Disclaimer of Warranty in their terms and 

conditions text. These companies then bear no responsibility for lost images 

and data if they go out of business or if their storage infrastructure fails. The 

photographer bears all risks!

Does the online site retain (and back up) the photographer’s images for a very 

long time period?

In some cases, the user may be unaware that during the ingest 

process, the online site downsizes the images and strips all embedded 

metadata. The site may then discard the original images, which 

saves storage space and speeds online presentation. But the images 

the owner and site users view and download may be of significantly 

lower quality than the images originally uploaded. Even if the 

original image is saved, there are numerous additional problems with 
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retention. What is the retention policy if the online site decides a 

user has violated the site terms and conditions? If another user lodges 

a complaint? If a user site becomes inactive and isn’t accessed for a 

period of time? If any site fees are not paid in a timely fashion?

Can designated people retrieve the photographs – with identifying captions, 

tags and descriptions – easily?

A subsequent chapter will describe how users should save and pass 

on usernames and passwords to sites so designated individuals may 

retrieve images at a later date. But most site applications only support 

one-at-a-time image retrieval. “Harvesting” all or a significant portion 

of a site may be difficult or impossible. Often there are third-party 

applications that may be used to harvest a site – if the site terms and 

conditions allow this. But what does the application retrieve? Will 

it include the captions and tags? Will it be easy to use? Will the 

download application be available and functional in the future?

If a site passes the business risks hurdle, we might find answers to the 

retention and risk hurdles by studying the online site terms and conditions, 

the site help files and perhaps searching user group threads. We may need to 

experiment by uploading, describing and retrieving some sample images. We 

may want to obtain a harvest application for testing – and note the time 

required to retrieve an image set. Downloading a particularly large image set 

from cloud storage can take weeks! Much research is needed to determine if 

a site might fit a user’s preservation requirements.
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Digital Preservation-Friendly File Formats for Scanned

Images

Bill LeFurgy

From a preservation standpoint, some digital file formats are better than 

others. The basic issue is how readable a format remains over the course of 

time and successive waves of technological change. The ideal format will 

convey its content accurately regardless of advances in hardware, software and 

other aspects of information technology.

Over the last several years, the Library has developed a web resource to help 

guide preservation-optimal choices in selecting file formats. Sustainability of 

Digital Formats Planning for the Library of Congress Collections outlines a 

number of sustainability factors that have a bearing on how effective formats 

are expected to be with regard to long-term preservation.

The factors are listed below, in brief.

• Disclosure - Degree to which complete specifications and tools 

for validating technical integrity exist and are accessible to 

those creating and sustaining digital content.

• Adoption - Extent of acceptance by the primary creators, disseminators or users of information resources.

• Transparency - Openness to direct analysis with basic and 

non-propriety tools.

• Self-documentation–Inclusion of metadata needed to render 

the data as usable information or understand its context.

• External dependencies - Degree to which a particular format 

depends on particular hardware, operating system, or software 

for rendering or use and the predicted complexity of dealing 

with those dependencies in future technical environments.

• Impact of patents–Extent that licenses may inhibit the ability 

of archival institutions to sustain content.

• Technical protection mechanisms - Embedded capabilities to 

restrict use in order to protect the intellectual property.

Application of these factors to current format choices has led to identification 

of different flavors of TIFF and JPEG 2000 as preferred choices for scanned 

digital images. Also in the mix is PDF/A-1, PDF for Long-term Preservation.

The Library is also working with the Federal Agencies Digitization 

Guidelines Initiative to define common guidelines, methods and practices to 

digitize historical content in a sustainable manner. The Federal Agencies Still 

Image Digitization Working Group, a subsection of the larger initiative, is 

concentrating its efforts on image content such as books, manuscripts, maps 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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and photographic prints and negatives.
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Archiving Cell Phone Text Messages

Mike Ashenfelder

As choppy and terse as cell-phone texting is, it is still correspondence. Since 

we value and save other text correspondence – such as letters and email – it 

seems natural that we might want to save text messages too. The problem is 

that saving text messages off a cell phone is not quite easy or convenient.

Cell – or mobile – phones could be loosely divided into two types: “basic” 

and “smart.” Both types store text, contacts and other information either on a 

drive or a detachable SIM card. If you want to save text/SMS messages, you 

have to transfer them off the phone and onto whatever storage medium you 

put your personal digital stuff.

Saving text messages is more difficult for basic phones. You have to open 

the phone, remove its SIM card and display the card’s contents through a 

SIM card reader. A reader is an inexpensive device into which you pop the 

SIM card, plug the reader into the USB port on your computer, display the 

SIM card contents and copy the text messages over. The “Text” – or TXT – 

format of the text messages is one of the least complex of all the computer file 

formats, so you can display the contents of a text message file with a basic text 

editor. You can even display it through a browser; text files get along well 

with several different programs.

Smart phones give you more control over text messages. You can either 

transfer the files over a cell-phone cable into a computer or transfer the files 

wirelessly via Bluetooth. You can find special software to access, view and 

manipulate the files. I have a nice $1.99 app for my smart phone that displays 

the text messages from my phone and gives me the option to save them all off 

the phone as a single file (with a choice from a few different formats) on my 

computer.

The app displays the contents of the SMS file organized into four categories: 

ADDRESS, the screen name of the person with whom I am exchanging 

texts; DIR, the direction the text in the conversation is going, whether it is 

coming in to me or going out to the ADDRESS; DATE, the date and time 

the text was sent; and TEXT, the body of the text itself.

Some cell phone text message software will enable you to recover texts 

you thought were deleted from your cell phone. This is possible because 

when you delete a text message, the text message doesn’t actually get 

erased. Though the phone tells you that the text is deleted, in reality the 

phone keeps the text for a while in a ghost-like state and makes the space that 

the text inhabits vacant and available to new text.

If new text comes along and it needs the space that your so-called “deleted” 

text inhabits, the new text will overwrite the old text (which is still squatting 

in the “available” space). If new text comes along and finds a space to park 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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and doesn’t need the “deleted” message’s available space, the deleted message 

will continue to exist, out of sight, until something eventually comes along, 

overwrites the deleted text and takes over its space.

Which means that some deleted text may still be recoverable. There is 

a big market for text recovery and text recovery software, especially for 

snooping. That is why, if you search online for cell phone text message 

recovery software, you will see many listings for commercial data-recovery 

products whose target audience is law enforcement, security, private 

investigation and other legal work.

If you are considering approaching your cell phone service provider to request 

a copy of your cell phone messages, expect to encounter legal obstacles; your 

provider will not just turn over your text message files to you, no matter how 

much ID you provide. There are strict laws governing access to your phone 

files, including the 2006 Consumer Telephone Records Protection Act, and 

the laws vary in complexity and severity from state to state. You can ask your 

local law enforcement agency for advice but ultimately you will probably need 

a court order to get the files.

It’s better, going forward, to plan for archiving your text messages. If you 

want to preserve them, get in the habit of not deleting your text messages 

from your phone, especially if a particular conversation is precious to you and 

back them up frequently.

It would be ideal if, every time I connect my cell phone to the computer to 

recharge it, software checks my cell phone for text messages that are new 

since I last plugged in, then automatically transfers the new files to my 

computer and archives them. Even better, it would be nice if the software 

simultaneously uploaded a copy to a cloud backup service. But until 

affordable, easy-to-use autosave software comes along, save your texts every 

time you recharge your phone.

Smart phone users, look into the appropriate text-message-saving apps or 

software for your phone. Those of you that have simple phones, look into 

SIM card readers but be sure before you make a purchase that this method 

works for your particular phone. You might want to ask for a demonstration 

in the electronics store, using the SIM card from your phone.

As a temporary solution, you can always email text messages to yourself 

and save them, one by one, on your computer. That method can quickly 

get tedious though. Ideally, technology should take care of text-message 

archiving in the background without bothering you to perform petty tasks.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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What Image Resolution Should I Use?

Barry Wheeler

What is resolution?

What resolution should I look for when I buy a scanner?

What resolution should I use when using my scanner?

These are questions we hear frequently when speaking to people about 

their digital conversion projects. Unfortunately, the questions are hard to 

answer. The material can get very technical and can be difficult to apply. So 

I’ll try to answer the first question now and the second two questions in a bit.

Here’s a sample scenario: You’re in the store looking at a scanner and the 

box contains perhaps the cheapest legal sized desktop scanner available. In 

big print the manufacturer claims, “2400 x 4800 dpi”. So, you have a very 

inexpensive scanner with very high resolution. This is just what everyone 

wants. But is this the only consideration?

Remember this – resolution is important but it is only one measure of scanner 

quality. Other measures are also as important but won’t be discussed in this 

series of posts. For example, two other important characteristics are: the 

range and accuracy of different colors the scanner can capture and the ability 

of the scanner to capture details in shadows and highlights.

If color accuracy and fine image detail are important, you have to consider 

much more than simple resolution.

Now, to begin to answer the first question – what is resolution? Let’s take a 

look at how a scanner works. A hidden stepper motor and gear train pull the 

light and sensor assembly along a geared track. As it moves, a light shines 

into the light guide and is focused up toward the page. The motor moves the 

assembly along in very small steps – the manufacturer specifies a rate of up to 

4800 steps for each inch the capture line is pulled across the document.

The stepper motor and gears are shown along with a portion of the 

light guide. The light guide is an optical plastic rod that spans the page 

width. The LED lights shine into the guide from one end; the baffles and 

mirrors guide the light onto the page and back onto the sensor.

The sensor is a row of 2400 light-sensitive diodes per inch. Each time the 

motor moves the scanning head a single step, the light along a row is bounced 

off the page and onto this line of tiny light-capturing elements.

Now we can understand the manufacturer’s claimed resolution. Since with 

each step, the reflection is measured along the row, the manufacturer claims a 

maximum resolution of 4800 rows per inch. Since there are 2400 sensors per 

inch in the row and each sensor measures the reflected light at one dot on the 

page, the manufacturer claims a maximum resolution of 2400 dots per inch 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 19 —

in each row. Thus, the manufacturer claims a maximum resolution of 4800 

dots per inch x 2400 dots per inch.

But the International Standards Organization (ISO) does not accept this 

claim.

With each step, each of the diodes attempts to measure the reflected light at 

one point. Technically, each diode measures a sample of the reflected light at 

each point. So, the ISO claims a maximum sampling rate of 4800 dots per 

inch x 2400 dots per inch.

Does this make a difference? Aren’t the terms “resolution” and “sampling 

rate” just different words for the same thing?

No. These words make a huge difference – believe the numbers and you may 

be very disappointed.

Manufacturers claim “resolution” is based on the number of steps per inch a 

small motor moves the scanner assembly (the rows) and the number of tiny 

sensors per inch the manufacturer puts on the assembly (the columns). But 

the International Standards Organization does not consider this the scanner’s 

resolution. The ISO defines the steps and sensors as the “sampling” rate 

because the sensors can only attempt to measure (sample) the brightness at 

each point. The ISO defines “resolution” as the actual result on the screen, 

not the number of sensors and steps that attempt to read each point.

We can think of the primary difference between measuring each point and 

actually resolving each point as “efficiency.” Some of these differences come 

about because the light may scatter and miss the sensor, the motor step may 

not be sufficiently precise, or the collected value may be inaccurate. Inside 

every scanner or camera, between the sensor and the screen is a small, 

highly specialized computer called a digital signal processor. This 

processor must work very hard to link a dot on the page to a dot on the 

screen. Unfortunately, sometimes a manufacturer attempts to compensate 

for scanner inefficiencies by over-processing the image data, introducing new 

problems.

The Library follows the ISO standards and scans a “target.” Then computer 

software applies sophisticated ISO specified formulas to measure the 

actual resolution. Targets and technology are necessary in a production 

environment, but you can do the same using your own images and your own 

software – your brain – to evaluate the resolution of an image. The targets 

used by the Library include figures to visually evaluate a scan. I’ve enlarged 

the central region of our target in the images that follow. By showing you 

how we examine this region, I hope to help you learn how to evaluate the 

resolution of your own scans.

Any numbers are only approximate but the analysis will show you if the 

resolution is sufficient for your own needs. By experimenting with the 

scanner software controls – and carefully examining the results – a much 

improved scan was produced.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 20 —

Now we can answer the question, “What resolution should I use?”

Assuming you will look at, or print, the image at the same size as the original 

(enlargements and film scanning will require another blog post), begin with 

a scan resolution of 300 dpi or 400 dpi. Choose a document to scan with 

some areas of fine lines and detail. Examples might be eyelashes, eyebrows, 

hair, small tree branches, perhaps detail in clothes, or many small windows in 

a building. Examine the resulting scan carefully. Look for clean solid lines, 

distortion, poor contrast between lines, false color, edge and halo artifacts 

around text. Then change the resolution, or the contrast, or the “sharpening” 

– change any one control and run another scan. Repeat several times. With 

practice, pick the scan you find best.

That’s it!
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 21 —

Personal Archiving in the Cloud

Mike Ashenfelder

Over the past few years I have been organizing my family’s digital videos 

and digitizing our old videocassettes. All along I have tried to follow the 

personal digital archiving advice that my colleagues and I publish about 

organizing and backing up your personal collections. Now that I have 

collected, organized and stored our videos on hard drives, I have a new 

challenge: backing the files up.

So far I have filled three 1 TB drives with all of our documents, photos, 

music and video files and I am working on a fourth drive, which means 

that I should buy four more 1 TB drives to back up the four I already 

have. Currently, the price of a 1 TB drive averages around $100, though the 

price will head lower..

Despite the reasonable price, and that it will be easy to backup our content 

onto four new drives, we still have to decide if the purchase of new drives 

fits into our budget. New hard drives are a lower priority for us than a lot of 

other things we budget for. So with each passing month our much-needed 

backup drives slip further down our list of priorities and our risk of losing our 

digital stuff slowly increases. I know we should upgrade and replace all of our 

drives in about five years or so; the clock is ticking as our current drives whir 

toward obsolescence.

Online backup storage is an attractive option, especially since a) data should 

be backed up in different geographic locations anyway and b) with online 

backup I don’t have to worry about periodic hardware upgrades. So I have 

been shopping for an online service.

Newcomers to online (cloud) backup have a lot to learn and many conditions 

to consider. What about the initial transfer when I upload all of our files 

to the cloud? Depending on web traffic, the speed of our network and the 

reliability and bandwidth of our cable provider and other factors, it might 

take a long time to upload my 3 or 4 TB of files to the cloud. Days, in fact.

What if the connection gets dropped during the file upload? Do I have to 

start over again? Are there limits to my file sizes? An hour of home video, a 

single uncompressed file, can be about 12 GB. Some services limit the size of 

the files they will accept to less than half of that. Does that mean I have to 

split all my video files in half?

Does the cloud service have tools available for upload and backup 

maintenance? Can the tools or services be configured for periodic automated 

backup? Can I access my cloud-stored stuff from any Internet connection, 

anywhere?

Costs and pricing plans vary. Some services charge per volume of data. For 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 22 —

example, one service charges $25 a month for 250 GB of storage or $100 

per TB per month...almost $400 per month for me to host my 3+ TB (and 

growing) of digital content. Other services have flat – and much, much lower 

– rates with no data-size limitations. That seems to be a more reasonable 

approach.

It takes a lot of research and feature comparison to find a reasonably priced 

online service to fit your needs. It might also take some trial and error, so it 

is important not to get locked into a long-term plan before you are certain 

that you are satisfied with the service. Some services allow you to pay 

month-to-month and some require yearly subscriptions.

The two essential elements you should research before you decide on an 

online backup service are 1) cost and 2) ease of use. Consumer cloud storage 

is still in its infancy and business models are still being invented, so take your 

time and make an informed decision before you open your wallet or start 

uploading your precious stuff. Ask your friends, relatives, neighbors and 

co-workers about their experiences and recommendations.

The saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” applies to personal 

archiving and not storing your digital collection in only one place. No digital 

storage medium is 100 percent guaranteed. Cloud storage is only one of 

several possible options. Storage diversity is important and I still eventually 

need to replace my four 1 TB drives. For now, cloud storage as a backup 

gives me a little more security.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 23 —

Family History and Digital Preservation

Mike Ashenfelder

The popularity of genealogy websites and TV shows is rapidly growing, 

mainly because the Internet has made it so convenient to access family 

history information. Almost everything can be done through the computer 

now. Before the digital age, genealogical research was not only laborious 

and time consuming, it also resulted in boxes of documents: photos, charts, 

letters, copies of records and more. Online genealogy has replaced all that 

paper with digital files. But the trade-off for the ease of finding and gathering 

the stuff is the challenge of preserving it.

The current spike in genealogical activity is significant. David Rencher, chief 

genealogical officer of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, 

acknowledged the increase but said that the appeal of family history research 

itself is not new. Rencher said, “Genealogy represents the interconnectivity of 

human relationships. It also helps us understand the heritage we came from 

and that many of our ancestors went through similar trials and tribulations 

that we go through. It can add an element of meaning to our lives.”

Brian Lambkin, founding director of the Centre for Migration Studies at 

the Ulster-American Folk Park in Northern Ireland, interprets part of the 

modern genealogy phenomenon – from his professional standpoint – as a 

continuation of the Irish Diaspora. Lambkin, co-author of Migration in 

Irish History 1607-2007, said that emigration is part of a larger, ongoing 

family story. “There are branches of families that have become separated,” he 

said. “But now the people doing the family history are making connections, 

coming back to Ireland and knocking on doors, saying, ‘I’m possibly related 

to you. Do you mind if I come in and have a cup of tea?’ Relationships are 

being re-established.”

And “relationships” is the key word in digital genealogy because relational 

databases are its engines.

Databases are programmed to find and display relations within a 

mass of data, which in digital genealogy, of course, means familial 

relations. Increasingly, census and registry information is loaded into 

databases and made available online where users can search birth and death 

records, marriage records, social security information and more in seconds, 

and follow branching information related to their initial search. Often they 

can download a genealogy database file – which may contain accumulated 

research that someone else has done – and add that information to their own 

personal database.

Any story about genealogy has to include the LDS Church. They have been 

gathering genealogical information since 1894, microfilming international 

family history records since 1938 and digitizing the microfilmed records 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 24 —

since 1999. They estimate they have records for over 5 billion people, a lot of 

which is available online from their familysearch.org site.

In 1984, the LDS church developed the GEDCom (pronounced “jed-com”) 

specification as a means of exchanging genealogical data. Though different 

genealogy programs have their own databases, GEDCom is now the 

international standard format. David Rencher said, “That means I can 

download my file electronically, send it to you and it doesn’t matter what your 

program is. You can upload the file and add the data to the data in your file.”

This standardization enables some exciting possibilities for genealogical 

research, especially when different organizations collaborate and configure 

their databases to interact with other databases.

Relational databases are the engines that drive digital genealogy. Databases 

make it possible to quickly search through enormous quantities of 

records, find the person you’re looking for and discover related people 

and events. When institutions collaborate and share databases, statistical 

information becomes enriched.

For example, the Centre for Migration Studies in Northern Ireland

collaborated with the Irish Family History Foundation, linking the Centre 

for Migration Studies’ database of ships’ passenger lists with Irish Family 

History Foundation’s database of Irish church registries. So, from one 

conjoined resource you can find birth and marriage information about an 

individual and the ship he or she emigrated on.

The Centre for Migration Studies also collaborated with Queen’s University 

Belfast to join three databases of differing content to create Documenting 

Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration. While most genealogical 

databases contain only text and maybe image scans of paper documents, 

some are beginning to enhance records with audio and video recordings. On 

Documenting Ireland, for example, you can listen to people talk about their 

lives and experiences. Similarly, you can enjoy audio and video oral history 

interviews on the Minnesota Historical Society website. If you are related 

to any of these people, just download and add all the juicy photos and 

recordings to your genealogy collection. Audio and video breathe life into 

genealogical data.

The collaborative LDS Church project Community Trees also includes 

some audio recordings but the LDS Church uses audio selectively. David 

Rencher of the LDS Church is cautious about adding multimedia. He said, 

“Multimedia is going to become expensive to store and preserve. We would 

rather come up with ways that we can help you preserve it.”

There are many more types of data and files – aside from scans, photos, audio 

and video – that we can associate with genealogical records. For example, 

GPS information, accessible from most smart phones and digital cameras, 

can be used to mark significant places related to a person, such as former 

residences or the location of his or her tombstone.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 25 —

With genetic genealogy, you could link a DNA profile to a record. When 

relatives add their DNA profiles to a familial database, it can reveal genetic 

patterns. Reagan Moore is RENCI chief scientist for the DICE center 

at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; he is also a lifelong 

genealogist. He said, “If you get a genealogy map of the entire family you 

can see who’s at risk for certain inherited problem traits.” According to 

Moore, such work is going on in Scotland but naturally the practice requires 

discretion and data security.

So why would modern genealogists want to gather all this data? Brian 

Lambkin, director of the Centre for Migration Studies, said that adding 

multimedia, geospatial data and more, enriches the biographical information 

about a person. “Potentially there’s a biography to be written about every 

single individual,” said Lambkin.

Amassing a collection of digital files raises the issue of how to store and 

preserve that collection. Digital genealogy could result in a heap of text files 

(such as GEDCom files), image scans (most sites enable you to save an image 

in either JPEG, TIFF or PDF formats), audio files and video files. It’s best to 

follow the Library of Congress’s personal archiving advice, which is basically 

to: 1) organize everything within one collection folder, 2) backup your 

collection onto several storage media in several different places and 3) migrate 

your collection every five years or so to new storage media.

Don’t trust that a third-party genealogy service will always remain in business 

and keep your stuff safe forever. You should have your own copy handy and 

another copy backed up somewhere else.

For its part, the LDS church is committed to ongoing preservation and access 

of its records. It expects to store more than 100 PB of data on tape in its 

Granite Mountain records vault, with a copy replicated somewhere else.

Online genealogical data will continue to grow exponentially as more and 

more people – lured by the ease and personal reward of discovering family 

history – get involved and add to the information pool. There will be more 

history to savor and more content to fill out our collections.

It helps that genealogical researchers and family historians are being invited 

to contribute information, not just by genealogical institutions but also by 

collaborative community sites like Glenelly, Our Home, which encourages 

people to contribute their memories and photos of a place and identify 

unknown people in other photos (which can then be downloaded and added 

to genealogy collections).

Randy Olsen, director of libraries in the LDS Church history department, 

is encouraged by this emergence of citizen archivists. He said, “If we allow 

members of the community to build and populate their own databases they 

will feel a sense of ownership. And the degree to which people participate 

and build (genealogical) databases will pay great dividends down the road.”
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 26 —

The Big Digital Sleep

Jefferson Bailey

Here on The Signal we often talk about the importance of preserving your 

personal digital materials and we provide a variety of resources offering 

guidance on what actions to take. One aspect we have spoken of less often, 

however, is what happens to your digital assets after you have “shuffled off 

this mortal coil,” to use Shakespeare’s exquisite phrase. Mike Ashenfelder 

will discuss this more in the next chapter.

But with the recent release of an app for a popular social media site that 

allows users to create a final, farewell video or text that is posted upon confirmation of their passing, as well as an upcoming SXSW panel “You’re Dead, 

Your Data Isn’t: What Happens Now?” covering the “legal frameworks and 

standards” for management of legacy data, it seems time to revisit the issue of 

digital estate planning.

The Problem.

It is by now a trite observation to note the extent to which our lives are 

lived “online” and that our personal materials and data exist largely in 

digital form, are housed in increasingly dispersed locations and are often 

held on third-party or “cloud” servers. At the same time, the ubiquity 

and accessibility of those digital artifacts of our lives – our electronic 

correspondence, our online journals and diaries, our camera phone pictures, 

all the digital “evidence of us,” – lends them a familiarity that often masks 

the legal and managerial complexity of that arrangement.

That same accessibility also gives those items a misleading sheen of 

permanence that defies the realities of what we euphemistically call our 

“human obsolescence.” As more of our valued “heirlooms” are created, shared 

and stored online, and with one popularly-cited statistic (which we can 

neither verify nor source) claiming that over 285,000 social media account 

holders pass away each year, digital estate planning is becoming an essential 

part of overall estate management.

The Legal Landscape.

Our digital assets are generally considered our physical or intellectual 

property; however, the legal permutations of that fact are still poorly 

defined. One early, notorious legal case contesting digital estate issues 

involved Justin Ellsworth, a U.S. Marine killed while on duty in Iraq in 

2004. Citing terms-of-service agreement language that forbid account 

transfers and terminated rights to content upon death, Justin’s email service 

originally denied his family’s attempt to recover his correspondence – a 

decision later overturned by a Michigan court.

Since that case, five states have enacted laws covering “digital assets” as part 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 27 —

of estate planning, with Connecticut passing the first law in 2005 and the 

most recent being Idaho, which allows a “conservator of the estate” to “[t]

ake control of, conduct, continue or terminate any accounts of the protected 

person on any social networking website, any microblogging or short message 

service website or any e-mail service website.”

Service Providers Approach.

Most major content or service provides have specific policies for how accounts 

can be managed or accessed after an account owner has passed away. While 

the processes for handling the accounts of deceased members may differ, most 

of these companies will have specific resources available in either their help 

sections or their terms of service detailing the steps that need to be followed.

For instance, there can be information on how to memorialize an account

and how to access a deceased person’s mail or microblog. Alternately, some 

companies have specific areas, such as Section 27 of this Terms of Service 

agreement detailing account rights post-mortem. Knowing these policies will 

help you plan accordingly.

Personal Digital Estate Planning.

There are a surfeit of online resources, articles, as well as conference 

proceedings and a burgeoning industry offering online tools and services to 

help manage estate planning for your digital assets. As well, our resources for 

preserving your personal digital archive will be useful when organizing your 

digital estate.

Similar to our advice on personal archiving, digital estate planning is 

organized around key activities. These include the need to identify all the 

online accounts, tools and services which are part of your digital legacy. This 

includes obvious entities such as financial and merchant accounts, online 

businesses, email, blogs and social media but also online storage accounts, 

web hosting information, domain names owned, online gaming information 

and any other online activity or service that merits inclusion in your digital 

estate.

Web bookmarks are a good way to identify potential sites to be included in 

your planning. You will also need to locate your digital assets, which live not 

only online, but also on your personal devices. Create a thorough list of all 

the computers, external drives and other hardware devices that may contain 

materials you want preserved. Describing the location of your digital assets 

will help your heirs manage the full range of your digital legacy.

You will also need to document all URLs, usernames, passwords, and, 

if necessary, specific devices, directories or specific file folders you want 

preserved or bequeathed. Documenting the means of access is required 

for your digital executor to manage your digital assets. This information 

can be consolidated in a password protected spreadsheet or document and 

periodically delivered to a trusted beneficiary or preserved in a safe, secure 

offline location such as a safe-deposit box.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 28 —

Documenting your digital estate also includes providing detailed instructions 

for how you want your digital archive managed. Should some items or 

accounts be preserved, deleted, bequeathed, or donated? Which items should 

be delivered to which trustee, friend or loved one? Can your heirs consider 

donation of your digital legacy to a local archive?

Lastly, the key step in digital estate planning is to authorize your digital 

executor in your legal will. You can grant this power to your overall estate 

executor or identify a separate digital executor to handle your digital 

affairs. If composing a legal will is too onerous, there are online forms

providing sample language and forms for granting authority to a digital 

executor.

Digital estate planning should be an essential part of any personal archiving 

effort. Our legacies and memories are now inextricably tied to the digital 

world and are subject to the ephemerality and custodial complexity that 

world entails. Effective digital estate planning can ensure the preservation of 

your cherished assets long after you are gone.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 29 —

When I Go Away: Getting Your Digital Affairs in Order

Mike Ashenfelder

Nowadays when we prepare a will, we have the added responsibility of 

leaving instructions to our loved ones about what to do with our online 

things after we die. Bequeathing has grown more complicated.

Much of our online content consists of our writings – email, text, tweets, 

blogs, wikis and more – and our loved ones would surely cherish some of it 

just as surely as we cherish special old cards and letters. The same goes for 

our online photos, videos, artwork and other things we’ve created.

All of this content exists in a situation unique to the digital age: it resides in 

cyberspace and, as such, some of it will continue to reside there long after we 

die while some of it will get deleted by their hosts after a period of time. But 

between hosting servers and online services, the content is held by third 

parties and is beyond our immediate control.

A few helpful advocacy groups are spreading awareness of this so-called 

“digital afterlife,” and an industry of commercial services is growing for 

online memorials, digital estate planning, post-mortem email notifications 

and more. As messy and mysterious as the process of getting your digital 

affairs in order might seem, it actually breaks down into a few steps

The first step is to inventory everything about your online life, such as your 

email accounts, Facebook, Twitter...everything. Use a speadsheet or create a 

table in a word-processing document. For each website, list the name, URL, 

your username and password. Include any additional information someone 

might need to access each account. Or indicate if you want an account 

deleted.

Note if there is any money at stake in an account or if there are any business 

implications.

The second step is to research any rights issues that may impede your heirs 

from accessing your accounts. When you create an account on most sites 

you agree to its policies or terms of service. Check each site for their policy 

on deceased members and the access rights of heirs. Determine what 

authorization you may have to supply, if any, and jot that information down 

on your inventory.

Some sites allow users to be memorialized after they die. Would you like 

that? Some sites permit account access to heirs and some don’t; those that 

don’t may offer instead the option for heirs to download the deceased user’s 

content. Some sites delete an account if it remains inactive for a period of 

time or if a due payment is not received, so note on your inventory if a site 

has time-related conditions. The Digital Beyond, an online resource for 

digital legacy information, compares policies for several of the top email and 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 30 —

social media sites. When dealing with third parties, such as the sites that 

host your accounts, know your rights.

It may help to designate a digital executor, someone who is Internet savvy, 

can carry out your instructions and, if necessary, work with the legal 

executors of your will. Attorneys know what they know and geeks know 

what they know; get the right person for the job.

The third step is notification. Tell your heirs about your intentions for your 

digital content. You don’t have to share usernames and passwords yet, just let 

them know that you’ve created a document with detailed information about 

your digital possessions and tell them where you will keep that document 

once you print it out. A logical place for it would be with your will or other 

important papers.

Also, leave instructions about who to email about your death. Your email 

contact list could be lengthy, so it may be wise to print the list and cross out 

the names of the people you don’t want contacted.

One additional option to consider is downloading all of your online digital 

possessions and backing them up with your personal archives. This can be 

time consuming and, since online content changes constantly, you’ll need to 

repeat the download periodically. But it will be less of a hassle for your heirs 

to find and access your digital belongings.

Above all, do your research. There are many digital-legacy services emerging; 

some might interest you and some might not. Do you want to designate an 

online memorial or grieving site on which your loved ones can commemorate 

you? Do you want to build an online avatar-ish digital replica of yourself that 

may continue to exist after you die? Do you want to arrange posthumous 

email messages from you to be sent out? Maybe you can find a digital estate 

planning service that will take care of everything. Search online for phrases 

like “digital legacy,” “digital executor,” “digital afterlife” and similar wording.

Planning is tedious but crucial and your heirs will appreciate your considerate 

forethought.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 31 —

Personal Reflections on Personal

Digital Archiving
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 32 —

Confessions of an Imperfect Personal Digital Archivist

Bill LeFurgy

I keep lots of digital photographs. Hundreds – thousands? – of family 

members, colleagues and others reside in my collection and are, as Susan 

Sontag said, “illuminated by a flash, fixed forever.”

As forever as I can manage, that is. Digital photos, like all computer files, 

are disturbingly prone to corruption and loss. As someone long involved 

with digital preservation, I worry about things like bit rot, failed hard drives, 

obsolete media and other technological risks. Sobering threats all, but they 

aren’t the biggest problem facing my personal digital files.

Frankly, I am the major issue. Risk correlates directly to the time and 

attention I allocate to manage the collection. Time to record metadata 

– significant details about the who, what and where – for each picture; 

attention to organize files into meaningful categories. The work is seductively 

easy to defer. It’s easy to assume that all the important details remain safe in 

my head.

There will always be time in the future, right?

I do some things fairly well. I have a specific directory on my computer for 

all photos, and the directory is duplicated using a web-based file hosting 

service. There are sub-directories arranged by year, and within them are 

additional categories arranged by subject. This basic level of control arrived 

some years after I shot the first digital photo or scanned the first 35mm slide, 

however.

For a long time I had unselected and uncorrelated batches of photos stored 

in separate directories on separate computers, storage devices and online 

services. My approach was to get the images off the camera and work on 

them later. Later was, well, always later. Every so often anxiety about losing 

an especially valuable group of pictures would compel me to copy them 

among devices. That left me with many duplicate images within the corpus 

as a whole. Things were getting progressively more disorganized as time 

passed. Motivation for change came when I started thinking about estate 

planning. “How,” I was forced to ask myself, “can I pass this photo mess on 

to my kids?”

The prospect of bequeathing a patrimony of regret focuses the mind.

The heart of the matter was that most of my photos were essentially 

opaque. It was hard for me to know exactly what I had and really hard to 

find a specific item. In considering my mortality, I knew that it would be 

extremely hard for anyone else to use these disorganized and unidentified 

photos, even though they document important family memories. I couldn’t 

even be sure the pictures would be found at all postmortem.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 33 —

It took me days to track down all my stray photographs on my multiple 

computers, external hard drives and social networking sites. Organizing files 

by year and then by subject took a while longer, after which many duplicate 

images were revealed. I meticulously compared the duplicates to find the 

best shot with the highest resolution and ruthlessly trashed the others. I then 

change file designations such as “DSC_0045.JPG” to a descriptive title for 

each photo, while also adding metadata about the people, places and other 

significant things pictured.

My next step was, as our very own digitalpreservation.gov personal archiving 

guidance says, to make copies and store them in different places. I copied 

the centralized photo directory from my home computer to an external 

hard drive, which I stored in a remote location. I then used a web-based 

file hosting service to create exact copies on two home computers and a 

cloud server. Finally, I printed out a written list of all the photos as they are 

organized, along with details about where they are stored; that went into my 

safety deposit box.

To be completely honest, I still have lots of work to do making my photos 

easier to find and use, especially by adding metadata. But, with everything 

centralized and securely backed-up, it is possible to devote a few minutes of 

spare time each week slouching toward better descriptions. Having a basic 

organizational scheme in place also helps me categorize and store the steady 

flow of new pictures.

Generalizing from my own experience let me offer some conclusions. First, 

people other than you probably care deeply about your personal digital 

photographs, and it’s a great investment of your time to make those 

photographs as useful as possible. Second, start where you are and aim for 

incremental improvement, while ignoring the burden of expecting immediate 

perfection.

To put it another way: personal digital archivists of the world unite! You 

have nothing to lose but your opacity!
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 34 —

One Family’s Personal Digital Archives Project

Mike Ashenfelder

In 1958, Vernon James was an adventurous young man from Colorado who 

landed a job teaching in Germany for the Department of Defense. During 

his 16-year stint there, he travelled extensively throughout Europe – including 

several visits behind the Iron Curtain into West Berlin – and he took lots and 

lots of photos.

Decades came and went and in 2005 Mr. James – who was retired by then – 

decided to scan his European slides along with the other slides and photos he 

had accumulated over the years. “I was ignorant of scanning when I started 

this project,” said James. “I had heard about scanners and bought a scanner 

with a slide attachment and I started scanning all of my slides.”

The scanner did just what Mr. James wanted it to do: it scanned. When 

he finished the slides he started on photos: from his wife’s year teaching in 

Ethiopia, from his wedding and more...a lifetime of personal photos. “After 

that we started scanning everything I had in the house,” said Mr. James. “I 

scanned everything from my birth certificate to things from my early 

childhood and little clippings in the local newspaper,” Mr. James said.

“I had a brother, Bob, who died in a Japanese prison camp in 1942 and my 

mother had saved the letters and memorabilia from him and I scanned all of 

those.

“I scanned letters my wife had written when she was overseas. And it kept 

on mushrooming. I kept finding more and more letters and documents. My 

wife has kept a diary starting from back in 1965 and I think I have 35 

years of diaries scanned.” Vernon had built up momentum and was being 

productive. What could go wrong?

Mr. James’s son, Stan, a game designer and Internet startup founder, was 

visiting his parents during a summer break from grad school, when Mr. James 

offhandedly told Stan about his project. “I was excited that he had done this 

on his own,” said Stan. “And being the tech guy, I looked his project over.”

Stan saw right away that the resolution was set way too low and the photos 

were in a virtual heap. In fact, one of Mr. James’s challenges in his project 

had always been organization. He said, “I didn’t have a system. It was 

just a hodgepodge.” Stan said, “I helped him put the scans into folders by 

year. And then shortly after that we had to separate by side of the family.”

After resetting the scan resolution and organizing the files, Stan bought his 

father a hard drive on which to store and preserve his stuff. From then on 

Stan was involved with the project, out of personal and professional interest.

It’s not that Mr. James did anything horribly wrong. In fact, he’s a smart 

man who he did the best he could with the little information he had. The 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 35 —

problem was more a scarcity of consumer-friendly personal archiving 

information that clearly addressed what Mr. James and millions of others 

were trying to do – create a digital archive of their personal stuff. Stan knew 

that if he and his dad were to work together, Stan had to keep his suggestions 

and information simple in order to avoid overwhelming his father.

From the early days of the project, Mr. James had diligently typed comments 

into his photos. Stan was shocked to find that the software Mr. James was 

using, the software that came with the scanner, was actually engraving 

the captions right into the photo image, not adding the captions into the 

back end of the file, as it should’ve. Hundreds of photos were marred with 

captions. Stan said, “It was almost as if you were to take a Sharpie pen and 

write on top of a print.

The James’s found great personal value in adding captions and tags to 

describe the contents of each photo. Stan said, “I and other family members 

were starting to ask dad questions, like ‘Who is that person in the picture?’ 

and ‘Where was that taken?’.”

In fact, captions and tags became so essential to the project that, when Mr. 

James had surgery on one of his fingers and couldn’t type well, Stan got him 

speech-to-text software and a headset. “My dad would sit in front of the 

computer with a little headset and just talk about the pictures as they went 

by,” said Stan. “My mom would laugh that her husband spent all day in the 

office talking to himself about the past.”

Mr. James’s relatives helped him identify names and places in the 

photos. Stan said, “Sometimes my dad will grab some relative and say, ‘Hey, 

look at this picture. Who is that guy in the background?’. Eventually I 

wrote some software to share our photos online, where family members could 

contribute captions and tag people, no matter where they are.” It’s sort of like 

“kin crowdsourcing.”

The tags not only helped the James family organize and find photos, it helped 

other people discover them online. Stan said, “A few weeks ago I got a call 

out of the blue, this guy with a thick German accent, saying that he had 

found the pictures that my dad took of a base in Germany where he had 

lived. I’m sure the guy was just Googling ‘Nellingen Barracks’ and found 

the captions that my dad typed in. And this guy was sort of an archivist for 

this military installation and he was asking permission to take some of those 

photos to put on the website he had set up for that base. That was a good 

feeling that my dad’s work wasn’t only for our family but it could also help 

the wider community too.”

Stan is frustrated that he can’t easily advise people on how to do a personal 

archiving project themselves, let alone share one online with other 

contributors. He said that most of the necessary tools still are not easy 

enough to use. Stan said, “And on the scanning side, you need to know 

about file systems and setting up folders and things like that, which is far too 

complex for most people. And frankly, they don’t need to know about that 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 36 —

level.”

Photos, which stimulate memories more than any other medium, have 

brought the James clan a little closer as they dig up more photos and 

scrutinize the content. Sharing the photos online helps preserve them (in 

addition to Mr. James backed-up originals) by spreading copies around.

Even after digitizing well over 20,000 items, Vernon and Stan James are far 

from finished. They say there is always more to digitize and there are more 

people and places to identify. Stan said, “The one thing that we’ve learn from 

this project is that it’s never done.”
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 37 —

My Weekend Project

Erin Engle

I bought a new computer this summer. I immediately copied all of my digital 

files from my old computer to my new one and to an external hard drive.

Now I had three copies of my digital content on three different 

devices. Now, if something happens to one of those media, I’ve got two 

others that have all my files saved (and safe). Great, right?

Well...

The hard drive on my old computer was failing, which is why I got a new 

one. My digital files on that drive aren’t exactly safe even though they are 

saved for the time being. Copies of my files on my new computer and my 

external hard drive are relatively safe (crossing fingers that those media don’t 

fail). Not to mention, I had two copies of ALL of my digital files, of which I 

had a general idea about what they were. But I certainly didn’t care about all 

of them.

This wasn’t a great start to creating my own digital archive. I know exactly 

the advice and steps to follow, so why wasn’t I doing it?

Because, I was being lazy. I am by no means as vigilant about archiving 

and backing up my personal files as some of my colleagues here at the 

Library. I’ve never experienced personal data loss (knock on wood) and I’ve 

never had enough digital files I’ve truly cared to save long-term.

Until now...

I started taking digital photos when I bought a camera about seven years 

ago. I first purchased digital music files around the same time. I wrote 

tons of papers for grad school. I completed my Federal and State taxes 

electronically. I created or saved all of these digital files on my old computer.

My digital photos and documents hold personal value, and my music files, 

most of which I’ve purchased, are valuable literally. I truly care about saving 

and preserving these materials. Time to create that archive.

Comparing what I’ve done so far with NDIIPP personal digital archiving 

guidance, I’m not in bad shape. I’ll admit I’m just barely performing the 

steps of this guidance. I could (and probably should) be more cognizant 

of the file formats and software programs used to access my files, for 

example. But this is the level of effort I choose to devote to save my digital 

information of personal value. Hopefully it’s enough for right now and for a 

few years down the road.

Given I don’t have a large amount of digital content as compared to other 

people I know, I should be able to finish my archive this weekend.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 38 —

So, let’s see where I stand against the guidance.

Identify where you have digital content of personal value – 

CHECK. (Although I have a few flash drives from grad school and I have no 

idea what’s on them.)

Decide which of that content are important and which digital files should be 

saved – CHECK. (I think... for the most part.)

Organize the digital files with meaning file names and a logical directory 

structure – NOPE. (I haven’t even starting thinking about this step yet.)

Make at least two copies of the organized digital files and store them in 

different locations – CHECK. (I keep my external hard drive at my family’s 

house, who live in the area. +1 for me – I’ve got step 4 down!)
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 39 —

Personal Archiving – Year End Boot Camp

Barry Wheeler

With the large size and amount of my personal digital archives, my archiving 

problem may be a bit extreme, but I think a description of my archiving 

system may be helpful to many people who want to save and preserve their 

digital files. I am a photographer and I have tens of thousands of pictures, 

including both professional and personal work, to archive each year. Add in 

my routine papers, spreadsheets, and data files and I often have over 500 GBs 

of digital files to preserve at the end of the each year.

I do maintain backups – but in my system, backups cannot be considered 

part of my archive. Backups preserve current work. Over the years, as drives 

fill up or I change computers, old files are removed from the primary drive 

on my main computer. I want to preserve all these files that are no longer 

part of my backups. My backups are also compressed and maintained by 

proprietary software. I’d prefer to have my archive in common standard 

formats that will be readable in the future – or at least will be easy to convert 

to an accessible format. Therefore I have developed a system of yearly 

archiving. Again, this system is mainly for those with above average amounts 

of digital material. For others, do not be discouraged by this! I’ve provided 

a simpler version for those with less material.

I prepared for my archiving task well in advance. All my content files are 

stored in directories by broad general topic, then in subdirectories named 

by date and specific subject. (All of my data subdirectories begin with the 

date in YYYYMMDD format so they sort automatically most recent to 

oldest). Once the files are organized, I follow these six steps in my end-ofthe-year archive processing:

First, I purchase a new external hard disk drive each year. I name the new 

drive – physically with a tape labeler and electronically in my drive properties 

tool. Thus, this years’ drive is ARCHIVE11. I also name a top-level 

directory “archive11”.

Second, I copy all documents for the past year to the new drive into the 

“archive11” directory. This should take about 33% of the drive space.

Third, I setup a powered USB hub connected to my primary computer and 

connect each of my yearly archive drives to the hub – each drive should 

appear on my computer desktop as ARCHIVEXX.

Fourth, I check the available space on last years’ drive. If I used 

approximately 33% of the space last year I should have enough space, so 

I create another top-level directory named “archive11”. Again, I copy all 

documents for the past year into this “archive11” directory. I now have two 

copies of my past years’ documents, each on a separate drive. As part of my 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 40 —

archive plan, I also keep a copy of my very best images on a remote, “cloud” 

site, but that’s another blog.

Fifth, I use a disk utility to check (and repair if necessary) the integrity 

of each external drive. Then I check file permissions with repair on each 

external archive drive. I also randomly select and open a number of files from 

each drive and each archive directory.

Finally, I import both the new archive directories into my cataloging database 

(again, perhaps a suitable subject for another blog) and then power down and 

store each drive with its’ power supply until next year. At this point I can 

delete all archived files I do not intend to work with immediately from my 

working drive. My yearly archiving processing is now done!

As promised, this process can be simplified and used by anyone who wants to 

archive their most important digital documents. The basic process a user can 

follow is:

Gather all your important data files into one master directory.

Arrange them by year – especially if you archive tax files.

Make copies of the files. If the total directory size fits on a CD (i.e. less 

than 600 MBs), then make separate copies on two archival gold CDs. The 

life expectancy of an inexpensive or standard CD is uncertain so I think the 

archival gold CDs are worth the extra expense.

Continue copying each year, on two new gold CDs.

Check all CDs yearly. If your document collection is too big for CDs, use 

external hard disk drives – and be even more vigilant in checking the drives!

This year I went an extra step – I added all the files saved in my CD-ROM 

archive over the past 16 years to my external hard disk drive archive. This 

second step is the subject of this blog post – that is, facing the reality, on a 

personal level, of all the issues archivists have discussed for years.

The transfer of content from one digital media type to a different type 

is called “format conversion”, or simply “reformatting”, and is similar to 

microfilming books and paper materials. This process is critical in the digital 

world – can any of us in 2012 easily read content from the 8” and 5 1⁄4” 

floppy disks so common in the 1980s? As I discovered, even though we still 

have the equipment to read CDs, other issues make the conversion necessary 

ASAP for those who want to archive their personal materials.

First, a stark summary – as a digital professional, I have 4 CD-ROM drives 

on MS Windows XP, MS Windows 7, Apple OSX 9.7 and Apple OSX 9.6. I 

have 62 CD-ROMs dating back to 1998. Of these CDs, one data disc looked 

OK but could not be read on any drive. Later I discovered a broken program 

disc. There were also two files (on different discs) that could not be read or 

copied, as well as 252 files that could be copied to the external archive drive 

but which were reported as “not readable.”
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 41 —

These results represent all the common problems of digital reformatting 

in general, and of CD-ROMs in particular. Interoperability was an issue 

for early generations of CD-ROMs , and I found that I needed 3 different 

CD-ROM drives to read my 62 discs. CD-ROM deterioration was another 

issue – particularly with inexpensive discs created on home machines. I could 

read all of my commercially created discs – all my “read” problems were on 

inexpensive discs I created myself. Unfortunately, I had not purchased any 

expensive gold “archival” CD discs – and I certainly should have used those.

The 252 files that were not readable represent the problems of proprietary 

software and software obsolescence. Several old video formats were not 

recognized but were readable when I manually associated the video file with 

newer video software. A multi-file interactive instructional lesson was not 

recognized – and I have yet to find a copy of the proprietary program used to 

create and play back the program.

What’s worse, my old federal income tax records from 1999 through 2006 

were not readable! I did not have a software program on my computer 

that could recognize the proprietary file type used to store those records 

since I changed from one tax preparation program to another in 2007. To 

read the files I had to retrieve my original tax preparation program discs – a 

different program for each tax year and load them onto my computer. But I 

discovered the disc for one year was broken into pieces – the disk was stored 

in a standard 3-ring binder of standard CD-ROM sleeves. I don’t know how 

the disc was broken!

Luckily, when I loaded the 2006 tax preparation software version it was 

able to read all previous data. For now I’m retaining the program disks – 

sometime I’ll experiment to determine if I can copy the 2006 program CD 

of the tax preparation software, which was designed to run on Windows XP, 

to my external archive hard disks and then install the program to my current 

Windows 7 computer. In the meantime, I’ve created and saved, on my 

external disk archive, a simple text file that documents the problem and the 

location of the original program disk.

These challenges illustrate some common difficulties in retrieving older 

personal digital records.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 42 —

“It’s Dead, Jim”: Resurrecting an Obsolete File

Mike Ashenfelder

While clearing out some personal clutter recently, I came across an old 

CD-ROM, published in 1989, that I always assumed was of great cultural 

value. Of course, when I tried to play it I got nothing but error messages and 

I set about finding a way to make it work.

The CD-ROM is the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog, which consists of 

content from the Whole Earth Catalog, a so-called “counterculture” print 

publication filled with practical tools, ideas and information not usually 

found in mainstream media. Its effect on our culture – our awareness of how 

we live and how we can better our lives – has been quietly pervasive. Steve 

Jobs acknowledged its influence in his 2005 commencement speech at 

Stanford University by touting the Whole Earth Catalog and using its 

philosophy as a rallying cry.

So it was a significant milestone back in 1989 when the catalog was converted 

into an interactive CD-ROM. The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog 

contained 2,500 reviews, 4,000 pictures, 2,000 text excerpts and – a novelty 

at the time – 500 sounds, mostly music (linked to music reviews) and bird 

calls (linked to Audubon Society bird information). Everything was smartly 

organized and hyperlinked for users to explore.

I figured that my copy of the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog was the digital 

equivalent of a rare book, a cultural artifact from a pivotal intersection of 

culture and technology. An object of value. Even though the disk was over 

20 years old, surely I could find something online that would enable me to 

play it.

The problem was not with the CD-ROM; after all it’s only the container 

in which the application resides. The problem was running the Hypercard 

application – or “stack” – that the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog was 

created in. (Hypercard enabled linking between metaphorical “cards” or 

screens and is arguably a forerunner of web browsers.) What the stack needs 

to run, according to the systems requirements, is a Mac Plus/SE/II with 

1 megabyte of memory, Mac system software 4.2 and HyperCard 1.2. I 

had none of these and my 2009-era computer couldn’t accommodate the 

antiquated technology.

I had only a few options. I could track down and buy an old Mac with the 

appropriate operating system but that was impractical since I really had no 

use for it aside from looking at this and a few other old stacks. Instead I tried 

to find some website or software that could convert or emulate – mimic – the 

old Hypercard software and Macintosh operating system. I searched and 

searched but couldn’t find a simple tool to convert or run the application and 

the few tools did find required a bit of techno-jiggering that I didn’t have the 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 43 —

time or patience for.

After mucking around online for far too long, I came across some screen 

shots of the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog as well as a working emulation 

of an old promotional music Hypercard stack by the group They Might Be 

Giants... and that’s when my enthusiasm for the project quickly faded.

The look and feel of the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog seemed dated, plain 

and unappealing. Big-pixel jagged black-and-white graphics. Click a button 

and display a card; click another button and play a sound. That’s it.

In the years since the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog’s release, the cells of 

high-tech innovation have rapidly divided and subdivided, one innovation 

begetting another, and our standards of “gee whiz” wonderment have evolved 

a lot. Just about any app on my smart phone is much cooler and more 

engaging than the Whole Earth CD-ROM. Which raised a few questions: 

If the catalog is available in book and PDF formats, why bother hacking this 

Hypercard stack? What’s the point of making it usable again aside from 

curiosity?

The same question could be asked of any other outdated software. Modern 

rendering engines are better than older ones, modern graphics are more 

lifelike, modern game response is faster and it’ll all keep evolving. Who 

really cares about reviving old applications?

For a while I considered throwing the CD-ROM away. After all, maybe it 

really was just a useless relic from some bygone era, one more thing that I was 

hanging onto for nostalgic reasons. Maybe, in the spirit of weeding out my 

possessions, it was time to let go and toss it. Eventually, out of frustration, 

I questioned its value and wondered who actually cared about outdated 

software. So I consulted some colleagues.

It turns out that some gamers care, especially those who are fanatical about 

the original look and feel of favorite old games. Many are dedicated enough 

to build their own emulators in order to continue playing the games.

And some cultural historians care. Geoffrey Brown, professor of computer 

science at Indiana University, says that cultural historians with technological 

interests may want to access old CD-ROMs to study the design decisions.

For example, the Library of Congress’s American Memory was initially 

created for Hypercard. Carl Fleischhauer, digital initiatives project 

manager at the Library of Congress, worked on American Memory from its 

inception. Fleischhauer said, “American Memory was put onto CD-ROM 

between 1990 to 1994. Then theMosaic browser came out and it became 

possible – and better – to put it all onto the web. We migrated all the 

content; nothing was lost. But even though the original disks still reside here 

in the Library, we can’t play them to see examples of our own original work.”

Brown has worked extensively with vintage CD-ROMs and he said, 

“Technology isn’t the problem, just lack of demand.” Indeed, just as 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 44 —

a cylinder recording circa 1900 will still play on a cylinder player, 

the Hypercard application will play on the appropriate hardware and 

software. But lack of demand makes it difficult for the average person to find 

free or low-cost resources.

Some institutions have created labs comprised of vintage technology, 

which they use for research. The Maryland Institute for Technology in 

the Humanities at the University of Maryland, for example, has collected 

hardware and software that date back to the early 1980s.

MITH’s preservation services are not open to the general public – it mostly 

serves the university and funded projects – but some outside researchers can 

find help there. Matthew Kirschenbaum, associate director of MITH, said 

he recently helped an out-of-state artist who wanted to restore some of his old 

digital artwork because he – the artist – valued its original appearance.

The Archeological Media Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder serves 

a similar function as MITH. Such labs are becoming increasingly necessary 

as institutions acquire collections that contain digital media, diskettes, 

CD-ROMs and even whole computers. Emory University is the recipient of 

such a collection, the Salman Rushdie archive, which includes the author’s 

personal computer resources.

In this video, Emory staff discuss the uniqueness of the collection for 

recreating Rushdie’s writing environment, such as Rushdie’s penchant for 

desktop sticky notes and the way his pages fit his computer screen (suggesting 

that the screen size may have influenced some of his composition decisions).

The Rushdie collection demonstrates the value of preserving vintage 

technology to support versions of artist’s digital work. It’s similar to 

preserving paper drafts of an author’s work to compare with the finished 

version, such as the drafts of Langston Hughes’s poem “Ballad of Booker T.” 

or Beethoven’s manuscript of Opus 109.

Geoffrey Brown notes that preservation of electronic games still has not 

improved and in time our modern games will, too, become inaccessible 

because of hardware and software dependence. “Look at today’s game 

platforms,” Brown said. “It’s virtually impossible to emulate them.”

Leslie Johnston, manager of technical architecture initiatives in at the Library 

of Congress, said that even our precious smart phone apps are destined 

for the same fate. “An app isn’t any better than a Hypercard stack,” said 

Johnston. “Because an app, twenty years from now isn’t going to run easily 

in the same way that a Hypercard stack isn’t. That app requires a certain 

operating system and certain hardware to operate.”

So the app, the game, the interactive CD-ROM...all eventually become 

museum pieces. That’s exactly where the salvation for curating and 

preserving vintage technology is likely to come from: museums, libraries and 

archives such as MITH, the Archeological Media Lab and Emory’s Rushdie 

archives.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 45 —

Kirschenbaum defends the preservation of vintage technology in select 

cases, if only for the primary experience itself (as opposed to simulating it 

with modern emulation methods). He said, “What you risk missing out on, 

even with emulation, is the entirety of experiencing the work in its original 

environment. Sometimes the complete physical platform, the hardware, the 

original technology is important and it is integral to what that thing is...Even 

if the graphics don’t look great by today’s standards, that particular look that 

we associate with a certain moment in computing – the pixels and the jagged 

appearance, the 8-bit graphics and tinny sound effects – that’s important for 

that work and for a lot of people it has a lot of emotional power behind it.” 

Or an appreciation by younger audiences for creations from the past.

Those of us considering what to do with our old software or hardware may 

face difficult appraisal decisions.

How about the stuff you created? Artwork? Documents? Kirschenbaum 

said, “If your personal data is important to you then you should become a 

preservation activist and know about the steps you can take to get it back.”

A lot depends on formats, of course. A twenty-year-old GIF file should 

be easy to open in a modern graphics program but a text document might 

be more difficult depending on the word processing program you initially 

used. Of course, once you restore your files, if they have personal value you 

should back them up on modern media. If they don’t have personal value – if 

it’s old homework, for example – delete them.

Commercial software and hardware are different. They have broad appeal, 

since many people enjoyed them at one time and, by dint of their widespread 

usage, they are true cultural artifacts.

One archiving solution is to donate them. If you can upload your software, 

the Internet Archive has a software archive that accepts donations. The 

Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, accepts software 

and hardware donations. They have an online checklist of what they want 

and what they don’t. The Computer History Museum is open to the public, 

so generations of visitors may be able to appreciate your donation.

And that’s what I decided to do with my CD-ROM of the Electronic Whole 

Earth Catalog: donate it. Better to have it curated by professionals and 

enjoyed by the public then neglected in my basement.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 46 —

The Results of One Scholar’s Survey: What Are Your

Plans for Your Personal Digital Archives?

Sarah Kim

Between June 2010 and December 2011, I interviewed 20 people about how 

they manage and preserve their digital documents and I asked about their 

long-term plans for their digital stuff. The interviewees were from varied 

backgrounds, including a policeman, a cartoonist, a restaurant owner, a 

lawyer, an artist, a designer, a librarian, graduate students, retired professors, a 

social worker, government employees and a software developer.

During each interview, I asked the participants what they plan for or expect 

to happen to their digital documents that they leave behind. I got a range of 

answers that I’ve organized into six categories:

• Delete everything

• Near the end of my life, create a condensed collection with 

selected documents

• Sort and distribute documents to people and entities, such as 

family documents to individual family members and work-related documents to colleagues

• No particular plan at this moment but will eventually leave 

instructions in a will for disposal or access

• Allow caretakers or others to manage, select and keep things 

they want

• Expect materials to be lost or deleted eventually

People have different plans for different materials. One participant said that 

he would like to delete everything before he dies. But he wants to leave 

certain documents to his daughter, especially digital photos of her – including 

her ultrasound pictures – that he has been diligently preserving.

One participant said that she wants to create a condensed collection near 

the end of her life. She wants to be remembered by her family and friends 

but she also thinks that her documents might be useful for other people, say, 

for understanding family history or studying how people live in the 21th 

century. But she has concerns for her privacy and feels uncomfortable about 

other people looking through her personal files.

Another participant sees sorting out her digital files as an opportunity to 

review her life. She also prefers to do it herself: “I don’t want to give others a 

burden of managing my files.”

Some participants will allow caretakers to manage their documents because 

of either the potential usefulness of personal documents for other people or 

a wish to be remembered by family and friends. They would also rather let 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

— 47 —

others handle the task because it is difficult to predict what may be useful for 

others and they are not concerned what happens after their death. Said one 

participant, “I don’t mind [people looking at my files], if I am dead.”

Here are some reasons that might affect the deletion or preservation of 

personal digital documents.

Reasons for preservation:

• Potential usefulness for other people, such as family history or 

other research

• Wish to be remembered by family and friends

• Sentimental attachment to certain documents, photos, recordings, video or other digital things

Reasons for deletion:

• Desire not to leave any trace behind

• Concerns for privacy

• Personal nature of documents (e.g., “My documents are just 

for me”)

• Belief in future disinterest in my documents

Overall, consideration for future generations in their family or 

potential audiences seems to be one of the main deciding factors for 

preservation. Most participants want to either actively or passively pass on 

at least some personal digital documents after they die. From the archives 

perspective, this is one of the moments when personal digital documents 

transform from “evidence of me” into “evidence of us,” as Australian 

archivist, Sue McKemmish observed.

What they want to pass along is not so much about themselves but more 

about things that can be useful for others. To many participants, the idea of 

passing belongings along to others seems supported by their own appreciation 

of having documents passed along to them from previous generations in their 

family, documents they considered valuable for learning about others more 

deeply, to explore family history and genealogy, and thus to understand who 

“I” am.

The theme of “for others” is also quite clear regarding what some participants 

do not want to leave behind, materials that they consider private. Moreover, 

the most passive cases, where participants simply expect their digital 

documents will eventually be lost, is also based on the idea that personal 

documents are “just for me,” thus “no one will be interested in them.”

Many participants, who have no plans at the moment but hope caretakers 

will handle their documents, talked about the potential usefulness of their 

digital documents for other people, not only just for their family and friends 

but also possibly for unknown people. They would rather let others decide 

what is useful for them.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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I expect that the participants’ thoughts will change as their lives move 

forward, so I intend to follow them over the next ten or twelve years.

What I learned from the participants is quite simple and by no means 

surprising: people see their digital documents as having potential value for 

others. They want their digital documents be useful for other people in the 

long run.

As several participants commented, managing digital documents can be 

burdensome work. I wonder, however, if consideration for the virtual 

presence of “others” – family member, friends, colleagues and unknown 

people – can make everyday digital record-keeping a more meaningful and 

enjoyable practice. I think it can.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Have Obsolete Digital Media, Will Travel

Keri A. Myers

I never planned to have obsolete digital storage media as a traveling 

companion. It just kind of happened... and I’m an archivist with lots of 

experience working with digital materials!

This summer I relocated to the Washington, DC, area after spending the last 

six years living and working as an archivist in London, England. It is good to 

be back in the country of my birth and I return with some good experiences 

under my belt.

My first job in the UK was as a project manager for the Trades Union 

Congress Library Collections at London Metropolitan University. I managed 

The Workers’ War: Home Front Recalled and Winning Equal Pay: the value 

of women’s work.

The task was to digitize a substantial part of the collections and create two 

websites to make those resources available. I oversaw the digitization process 

of photographs, posters, letters, pamphlets and other ephemera. I created 

archival data copies, added all the metadata to the collections management 

software and prepared and converted oral history and video clips for 

uploading to websites.

My work experience at the TUC Library six years ago really sparked 

an interest not only in digitization but the issues surrounding digital 

preservation.

Another part of the job which I really enjoyed was working on outreach 

and education. Together with our project partners, I built a mock factory 

which was a traveling exhibit highlighting the work experiences of those in 

Britain during the Second World War. Taking place in year of the sixtieth 

anniversary of WWII, we toured the country at commemorative events, 

culminating in the great celebration in London’s Hyde Park.

My next stint of employment was at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library 

at the English Folk Dance and Song Society. As the organization’s first ever 

archivist I had my work cut out for me. I was in charge of developing an 

archival program to accession and catalog the organization’s rich history 

focusing primarily on the manuscript collections but also was left to tackle 

the organization’s rich film and audio collections.

I focused on creating condition reports for manuscript collections to be 

digitized, which lead to Take 6, a searchable database of manuscripts from six 

folk song collectors, as well as the digitization of Cecil Sharp’s diaries from 

his collecting trips in the Appalachian Mountains.

So as I find myself in a new city looking for new opportunities I have 

started volunteering at the Library of Congress with NDIIPP to further my 
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understanding and interest in personal archives management and digital 

preservation.

And just like NDIIPP, my interest is in the personal as well as 

professional. My parents were elated with my return to the US–it meant 

I could finally claim all my boxes in their attic. Now I am working on 

processing my personal collection of papers and finally tackling my digital 

assets as well.

I am ashamed to admit that I’ve traveled with obsolete media from the 

U.S. to Europe and back again. I have set myself a goal to finally organize 

my papers and do a bit of personal digital archiving to rediscover what I 

dumped on those Zip disks all those years ago. Meanwhile, I’m looking 

forward to testing NDIIPP’s personal digital archiving advice.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Forestalling Personal Digital Doom

Tess Webre

Even though I’m relatively new to the professional library world, I’ve long 

known that digital preservation on a personal level is a daunting task laced 

with threats of doom. It requires great amounts of time, energy and consideration with very few visible benefits from day to day.

Like organizing a closet, or rearranging a kitchen cabinet, personal digital 

archiving is easy to put off, easy to forget and easy to make excuses for 

avoiding. It is tempting to look at disorganized files and pantries and shrug 

them off by saying “I’ll work on this tomorrow.” How quickly we realize the 

error of our ways.

As soon as a disaster occurs and we find ourselves surrounded in disarray and 

must pick up the pieces. Just as kitchen cabinets need to be organized after a 

bag of rice spills on the floor, we start thinking about digital archiving after 

we can’t find a file, or access a piece of software.

Who among us has not lost a piece of valuable digital information? Our 

data can go out with a bang of a laptop being dropped or the whimper of 

scratch on a CD. We can lose our data with the excitement of graduation 

or the mourning of a funeral. Personal files can be lost with the closing of a 

company or the changing of a leader.

For reasons as diverse as natural disasters to software obsolescence, 

accessing our data can be impossible. We can discover the inaccessibility 

of the data immediately, months or even years after it occurs and feel the 

same paralyzing inability to do anything about it. Is there anything more 

frustrating than this?

It seems to me that there are two paths following the loss of data. Option 

one: consider this to be a fluke, and continue on with day to day life without 

making any of the necessary changes to preserve data. By ignoring the 

greater implications, the data loss will be repeated. It is just a matter of 

time before more and more data becomes lost. It will start as a trickle, and 

become a flood. Until responsibility is taken, this will become a cycle.

Option two: learn the implications of this data loss: if one piece of digital 

data can easily become inaccessible then any piece of data can become 

inaccessible. This puts every photograph, every email, every home video, 

every e-filing and every other bit of memory in your digital history on 

the proverbial chopping block. That is a terrifying possibility, but not an 

inevitability as long as steps are taken to actively preserve digital data.

However, taking the next step can be difficult. With the relative newness of 

digital preservation and the plethora of different storage facilities and types, 

one can easy get lost in a technical jargon, and ambiguity. It can lead to 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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more questions than answers.

What exactly is metadata and how do I make sure I have enough? Is it better 

to preserve material in the cloud or aphysical storage media? As the questions 

mount, so does the frustration. It becomes easy to just give up on trying to 

preserve personal data for the future, to continue to put off the necessary 

steps until the next disaster occurs, thus starting the whole process over again.

One of the things I’ve learned during my internship is just how useful the 

NDIIPP personal digital archiving information is for helping people do the 

right thing with personal files. Written in a clear and relaxed tone (and, 

really, I’m not trying to curry favor!) I’ve found the website, as well as blog 

posts by Mike Ashenfelder and others to answer all kinds of questions.

I wish I could testify that the NDIIPP information has totally dispelled my 

fear of impending digital doom. It hasn’t. But it has inspired me with 

ideas and insights I can apply to push my personal digital threat level back to 

a safer place.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Remember When We had Photographs?

Leslie Johnston

On a recent trip I visited a funky vintage store to see if anything caught 

my eye. While I was easily able to keep myself from buying any jewelry or 

taxidermy, I came across a number of displays of family photographs available 

for sale.

Not only were there bowls of loose photos, there was a dis-bound photo 

album from an African-American family that seemed to be from the 1920s 

and 1930s, where everyone and every place was identified.

This saddened me and led me to think about my own experiences in trying to 

make family photos more preservable.

I have recently undertaken an effort to deal with the archive of photos that 

I have in my possession. Some are older family photos from the nineteenth 

and early twentieth century. I have my father’s baby book from the 

1920s. Some are from my parents, and include slides taken by my father in 

Asia in the 1940s-50s. I have my photo albums from my teenage years when 

I had my first camera. Most – except the slides – are labeled with names and 

dates.

When I switched to digital, I put my images on flickr, and tagged them with 

some degree of regularity. Dates from file headers, some places, some names.

Then there are my own photo albums from the 1980s through the 

2000s. They are chronological, but not labeled. I have discovered that 

I have no idea where some were taken, or who they depict. Last year I 

digitized a number of photos and slides for a friend who had lost her photo 

collections. The digitization was easy. The metadata was hard. Keeping the 

metadata with the files was even harder. I resorted to file naming conventions 

(event_details_year) where I could, and created a spreadsheet with as much 

metadata as I could supply, such as people or places, and more granular dates 

such as birthdays or holidays.

So, getting back to those photos in a bowl at a vintage store. There are two 

topics to consider:

What will your friends and family do with photographs that have no 

accompanying labels, written on the back or in albums? Will they be of 

enough value to retain, or will they end up at a garage sale or antique store?

What will your friends and family do with digital image files with no 

metadata?

So the advice is:

Record what you can about photos or digital images as soon as you can.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Keep the metadata and descriptions with the files and photos. Name the 

files with understandable names, and label the backs of photos with soft lead 

pencil (not ink). If you have photo albums, write out captions. If you upload 

to online services, caption and tag them.

If I can’t remember who is in a photo that I took only a few years ago, it’s 

likely that no one else will, either. If no one knows what the photos are, no 

one will value them enough to preserve them.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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When Data Loss is Personal

Leslie Johnston

On November 12, 2012, my home was broken into and robbed. I lost 

jewelry, some vintage tech (my beloved 1993 Mac Duo 230 laptop), and, 

more importantly, my netbook that I use for all my personal computing.

I have learned a lot of lessons from that experience.

First, I am very glad that I have a password app on my cell phone that has a 

record of all my logins and passwords. My laptop was password protected 

of course, but not encrypted. Because I love the convenience of saved 

passwords in my browser, I had to immediately change all of my login 

passwords. Because a file was on my laptop had the ability to connect to 

online accounts, I needed to immediately contact financial institutions. I 

also called in a Fraud Alert to a credit service with which I already had an 

account.

I had the serial number and receipt for my current laptop, but not for my 

vintage laptop. Record serials numbers and scan receipts and keep them 

somewhere that is NOT your laptop.

I back my data up onto a network attached storage device, so I am good 

with that (although I hadn’t done a full backup in 2 months so I lost a few 

files). But when I needed to access those files before I replaced my laptop, 

I didn’t have a machine in the house that could access it. So, I also need 

to additionally get myself an external drive that is more easily portable 

with a USB connection that I can hook up to any machine, anywhere. Of 

course, they could have taken my NAS, too, and I would have been out of 

luck. Except for my pre-2008 files which I also have on CD-ROMs because 

that’s how I migrated them then.

I do have copies of some things in the cloud, like photos and my recent 

email. But not my full email archive, which is on my NAS, and requires an 

application that I cannot install on my temporary machine because it’s not 

supported on that OS.

And I could not get my temporary machine to recognize my wireless 

printer. How many documents you need to print is not something you think 

about when planning for an emergency.

So...what lessons did I learn?
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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• Keep an encrypted file of logins and passwords (and account 

numbers) on some other type of device altogether. But also 

print out a copy somewhere.

• Have two local copies of your files, one of which is easily 

portable to another location and other type of hardware in an 

emergency and an additional cloud copy is not a bad idea (but 

it’s a bad idea for that to be your only copy).

• Of course retain data that runs only in specific applications, 

but try to export/create copies that are application neutral.

• Scan printed receipts and key documents. Print vital e-only 

documents. Keep your print copies and your e-versions someplace secure, and keep the e-versions in more than one place.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Personal Digital Archiving Outreach
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Hey Libraries and Archives: Personal Digital Archiving Kit

Now Available

Keri A. Myers

Let’s face it: most of us fall short of perfection when it comes to managing 

our personal digital materials. We do things like download personal photos 

to our computers and promise ourselves that we will come back later and 

give them meaningful file names, tags and other important metadata. Since 

I began volunteering here at NDIIPP I have increasingly been aware of my 

personal digital archiving habits and the challenges they pose.

A big part of the problem is that there are few sources of advice for people to 

learn about personal digital archiving. Local libraries and archives are in the 

perfect position to fill this gap.

That’s why my colleague Erin Engle and I have been constructing a resource 

kit to help local institutions provide links to information about personal 

digital archiving. The kit also provides resources to support a local “Personal 

Digital Archiving Day” to connect directly with patrons.

The kit is aimed at libraries, archives and other cultural intuitions staff and 

gives basic guidance on how to organize an event. It includes some tips for 

organizing an event, as well as free handouts, videos and web resources that 

staff can use. Also provided is a list of additional resources, including some 

format-specific advice.

The kit highlights various NDIIPP resources and handouts providing a 

perfect introduction for informing the general public on important tips and 

strategies for preserving their digital files, photos, videos, emails and social 

media accounts.

We’re hoping you’ll help spread the word about digital preservation and host 

a Personal Digital Archiving Day event during ALA’s Preservation Week

activities.

So grab a download of the kit and get organizing a local event.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Pass it On: Library of Congress Events for Preservation

Week 2012

Jefferson Bailey

“mr Ballard left home bound for Oxford. I had been Sick with the 

Collic. mrs Savage went home. mrs foster Came at Evening. it snowd a 

little.”

So begins the diary of Martha Ballard on January 1, 1785. Martha was a 

midwife and prolific diarist who wrote in her diary almost every day for 

the next 27 years until her death in 1812. There are nearly 10,000 entries 

in the diary; though often brief, they provide a unique, invaluable insight 

into the politics, economics, family dynamics and daily life of her era. As 

one of the only written accounts of female life in early rural New England, 

Martha’s diary offers us a window into a forgotten and seldom-accessible past 

and is indicative of the kind of “history from below” that counterbalances 

the monolithic, overbearing narratives of the rich and powerful that can 

sometimes dominate historical discourse.

“The problem is not that the diary is trivial but that it introduces more stories 

than can easily be recovered and absorbed... Martha’s diary reaches to the 

marrow of eighteenth-century life,” wrote Laurel Ulrich in her 1991 Pulitzer 

Prize winning book about Martha’s diary, A Midwife’s Tale, parts of which, 

along with the full diary, are available online.

How, you may ask, did this at-first-glance-unremarkable woman’s diary end 

up recognized as an invaluable historical resource that led to a prize-winning 

work of history almost 200 years later? The diary was passed down through 

generations of the Ballard family until it was donated in 1930, 118 years after 

Martha’s death, by her great-great-granddaughter to the Maine State Library.

Now ask yourself, if one of your parents handed you his or her diary on a 5 

1⁄4” floppy disk from 15 years ago, would you even be able to read it?

We talk a lot on this blog about personal archiving, but stories like Martha 

Ballard’s remind us of the importance of preserving and passing on our 

personal archives. However, contemporary storage media and even file 

formats can be outdated and inaccessible in just a handful of years. Due to 

the fragility of digital information, preserving our personal digital materials 

requires a level of management that wasn’t previously necessary for paper.

We are excited to announce that, in conjunction with ALA’s Preservation 

Week (April 22-28, 2012), we hosted a number of events throughout the 

Washington, DC, area to provide in-person guidance and help to those 

interested in preserving their digital collections.

A full list of our Preservation Week activities, including descriptions of each 

program, can be found on our website and on the Library’s official press 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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release.

And for those readers at institutions considering hosting a Personal Digital 

Archiving event, consider using our Personal Archiving Day Kit and our 

online resources.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Librarians Helping Their Communities with Personal

Digital Archiving

Mike Ashenfelder

During Preservation Week 2012, April 22-28, librarians nationwide held 

events on saving personal digital possessions. These events are evidence of 

how librarians are stepping up and taking on the responsibility of helping 

their communities understand digital preservation.

Julie Mosbo, chair of the Preservation Week Working Group and preservation librarian at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, said, “Libraries 

and librarians, as places and keepers of knowledge and information, have 

a great opportunity to promote digital archiving to the public. I think 

(librarians) are the perfect group to teach it but I’m not sure the public is 

aware that librarians/libraries can help them with that kind of service. I 

think to many folks we are still seen as ‘book’ people. Our desire to help and 

educate are natural opportunities to provide information on preserving digital 

items.”

Some of the Preservation Week presentations included:

• Michigan – the Kalamazoo Public Library presented “Digital 

Photos 101” and the Ann Arbor District Library presented “Preserving Your Digital Photos with Archivist Lance 

Stuchell.”

• Indiana – the Westchester Public Library presented “Managing Your Digital Photos.”

• Maryland – the National Library of Medicine presented 

“Digital Memories: Preserving Your Personal Digital Photos, 

Documents and Videos.”

• Virginia – the Big Island Library presented, “Computer Skills: 

Digital Photos 101.”

• Colorado – staff from the Denver Public Library helped people digitize their personal items as part of the “Creating Your 

Community” oral history project.

Note the dominant theme of preserving digital photos. Though all digital 

files need to be properly preserved, cell phone cameras have helped raise the 

digital-preservation stakes by generating tens of millions of photos daily, 

photos that many people may not know how to preserve. Digital photos are 

everyone’s top personal archiving concern.

Staff at the University of California San Diego held an afternoon event titled, 

“Personal Digital Archiving Day Event to Provide Tips on Preserving Your 

Stuff.” Like the Denver Public Library’s event, UCSD digitized things for 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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people as part of their “how to” demonstrations, expert consultations and 

information presentations.

The UCSD event was ambitious partly because it included a lot of hardware 

for the demonstrations, which involved schlepping it all around, setting it all 

up, making sure it worked properly during the demonstration and moving 

everything back to the labs afterward. But demonstrations convey a lot of 

information (“Show me how to do it”) and make an educational impact. The 

UCSD demonstration hardware included scanners and workstations for 

digitizing 16mm film, slides and audio (for LP records).

Roger Smith, head of the UCSD Preservation and Digital Library, said 

the staff had plenty of in-house digital-preservation expertise among them 

and didn’t need outside resources, though they would consider showcasing 

commercial vendors in future events. “We have folks that work regularly 

in those areas so it really wasn’t hard to come up with information,” said 

Smith. “Within a couple of planning meetings, everyone had good ideas and 

it all flowed organically. And we knew the audience we were preparing for, so 

we understood not to get too technical. We knew it would be more effective 

to stay at an overview level.”

The audience was demographically mixed, old and young, UCSD people and 

members of the community. Smith expressed pleasure that the event sparked 

an enthusiastic dialog among UCSD staff in the audience, who shared 

experience and ideas on the various approaches to reformatting and digital 

preservation.

In New York, the New York Public Library presented “Archiving and Storage 

of Personal Media and Digital Files,” which offered advice on how to preserve 

what the presenters called “machine-readable memories.”

One of the presenters, Nick Szydlowski, IMLS preservation administration 

fellow at NYPL, said that the combination of material and digital 

presentations worked well and made an impact on the audience. He said 

the audience was diverse, both in demographic makeup (“Though it skewed 

older,” Szydlowski said) and in technological understanding. There were also 

some people from smaller institutions in the area who were interested in the 

topic and were considering creating their own archives. They were coming at 

it from a more professional and technologically savvy perspective.

Like Smith at UCSD, Szydlowski was careful to not be too technical. “One 

of the big challenges of talking about this to the general public is figuring 

out how technical to be,” Szydlowski said. “How much to give technical 

information and how much to just give recommendations without much 

background.” He said he would definitely do it again and maybe next time 

include more information about the threats to digital files.

Activist Archivists, of which New York University professor Howard Besser

is a founding member, held an event at NYU’s Michelson Theatre. Activist 

Archivists are encouraging members of the Occupy movement to record and 
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archive their activities. As part of their efforts, Activist Archivists distribute 

digital preservation information to Occupy participants, such as “7 Tips to 

Ensure Your Video Is Usable in the Long Term” and “Best Practices for Video 

Activists.”

The Library of Congress hosted several presentations during Preservation 

Week, both on campus and at the Arlington County Public Library and the 

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial DC Public Library. A month earlier, I 

gave a presentation at the library in Fredericksburg, VA, and in February I 

gave a keynote speech titled, “Communicating Personal Digital Archiving to 

the General Public” at Personal Digital Archiving 2012.

During Preservation Week, the Library of Congress presentation with the 

greatest national reach was Bill LeFurgy’s webinar titled “Preserving Your 

Personal Digital Photographs,” which was viewed by over 570 people. Most 

of the nationwide events listed on the Preservation Week event finder include 

public viewings of LeFurgy’s presentation.

During the year, staff from the Library gave presentations at South by 

Southwest, Save Our African American Treasures and the National Book 

Festival. This is an opportunity for us to not only share information but 

also to listen to people’s questions and get a better understanding of their 

information needs.

Audience questions often raise issues that we had not considered before and 

we respond by publishing information such as “How to Transfer Video from 

Tape, DVD or Camera to Your Computer” and ”How to Transfer Photos 

from Your Camera to Your Computer.” More and more we try to not make 

assumptions about the level of technological expertise and comfort of our 

audience.

If you are considering putting on a personal digital archiving event, please 

peruse the Library of Congress personal digital archiving resources. If you 

are considering an all-day event, please look over the ALA resources and our 

own Personal Archiving Day Kit.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Preserving Your Personal Digital Photographs: Library of

Congress Presents Online Session

Bill LeFurgy

Do you wonder if cloud storage is a good option for your personal digital 

photographs? Do you have questions about metadata and file formats? Are 

you uneasy about the prospects of keeping your digital photos available for 

yourself and your family into the future?

If so, you have lots of company.

On April 26, 2012 over 570 people participated in a web-based presentation 

about preserving digital photographs. I had the pleasure of giving the session 

on behalf of the American Library Association’s Association for Library 

Collections and Technical Services as part of Preservation Week. A recording 

of the session and a copy of the slides are available on the ALCTS website.

The presentation discussed how to identify the different places where 

personal photographs might lurk, as well as how to decide which images are 

most important and ways to organize your collection. I talked about the 

importance of making copies and storing the copies in separate places. I also 

touched on metadata, file formats and storage media options.

The talk had a dual purpose. The major intent was to give basic tips 

about what people can do to preserve their personal digital photo 

collection. Digital photography has grown phenomenally popular in the just 

the last few years, and there is a shortage of practical information about how 

to manage personal images. The National Digital Information Infrastructure 

and Preservation Program has provided personal digital archiving guidance 

for several years, and the presentation drew from information on the program 

website.

My second goal was to encourage librarians, archivists and other information 

professionals to get involved in providing similar advice within their 

communities. I made the point that the need for personal digital archiving 

advice is going to keep growing and that librarians are exactly the right 

people to help meet this need.

I was grateful for – and amazed by – the many dozens of questions submitted 

by listeners. I could only address a few of them in the time I had, but it’s 

clear that this is a topic that many people need more information about. This 

evidence will help spur us on in our efforts to raise awareness and spread 

information.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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ALCTS, PLA and Library of Congress Collaborate on

Personal Digital Archiving Campaign

Mike Ashenfelder

The Library of Congress, the ALA Association for Library Collections and 

Technical Services and the Public Library Association have joined forces to 

spread information about personal digital archiving, using public libraries as 

information resources for local communities.

Barbara A. Macikas, executive director of the PLA (a division of the 

American Library Association), said that the shared mission of the Library 

of Congress, the ALCTS and the PLA will help fulfill the mission of the 

IMLS-funded Digital Learning Resource project, to develop a collection of 

digital literacy resources that will be accessible to libraries, patrons and other 

community-based organizations. Bill LeFurgy, digital initiatives program 

manager at the Library of Congress, joined the DLR project at the ALA 

Midwinter conference 2013.

Charles Wilt, executive director of the ALCTS, invited staff from the Library 

of Congress to present two webinars before and during Preservation Week 

2013.

The first webinar, on March 20, is directed at librarians who are considering 

hosting a personal digital archiving day event. The webinar explains the 

issues around personal digital archiving and reviews the resources the Library 

of Congress has made available for the public and for librarians to present to 

their communities (such as the Personal Digital Archiving Day kit).

The second webinar, on April 24, is directed at the general public and it will 

be a comprehensive overview of the issues that are at stake and what average 

people can do about preserving their stuff simply and properly.

Both webinars are intended to help audiences understand the nature of 

our common digital files – such as digital photos, recordings, video and 

documents – and learn what it takes to preserve them as well as we might 

preserve our physical possessions. Technology changes rapidly and without 

proper care of our files, we could lose access to them.

ALCTS, PLA and the Library of Congress share the conviction that the 

local public library is a natural resource from which the community can get 

information about personal digital archiving. The Library of Congress has 

conducted outreach events at public libraries close to Washington, DC, and 

has honed its outreach message for clarity and simplicity. At these events, 

Library of Congress staff was enthusiastically received by both the librarians 

and members of the community. Everyone was grateful for the expert 

information and guidance. The audience’s follow-up questions helped shape 

and tighten the Library’s subsequent presentations.
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The PLA will offer ongoing information about Library of Congress personal 

archiving resources through its electronic newsletter, Facebook site, website

and Public Libraries Online. The mutual, long-term goal of both institutions 

is to keep up the steady drumbeat of communication until eventually the 

message reaches everyone and good personal digital archiving practices 

become second-nature.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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We Talked and Talked About Personal Digital Archiving

Erin Engle

A man wanted to migrate his dissertation from punch cards.

A young girl held a floppy disk for the first time and expressed wonder that it 

had anything to do with digital information.

A woman–the family archivist–wanted to pass her digital collection to the 

next generation.

These are some of personal stories I heard at the 2011 National Book Festival

on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

For the second year in a row, NDIIPP participated in the festival, providing 

personal digital archiving advice to all comers. My colleagues and I had a 

fantastic time at our table in the Library of Congress Pavilion.

We enjoyed talking with hundreds of people who stopped by. We had the 

chance to hear directly about hopes, dreams and fears about saving personal 

digital information. Even more importantly, we spoke with lots of people 

who hadn’t given much thought to the issue.

Over the two day festival, we passed out handouts providing high-level 

personal digital archiving tips (based on information from our website), 

answered questions about how to save digital photos and other forms of 

digital information, and talked to people about how technology has changed 

over time.

Computer storage media and other technology changes very quickly, a fact 

that we demonstrated with a display of obsolete equipment. This is an 

effective way of reminding people that what they create and save today may 

not be accessible just a few years later.

We had an array of older storage and computer technology on display. These 

relics from the past really engaged the public walking past our 

table. Someone even described it as a “walk down memory lane.” We had 

examples of punch cards, 8-inch and 3.5 inch floppy disks, zip disks, hard 

drives, laser discs and even an Apple PowerBook Duo 270c from 1992. Talk 

about a relic!

I was pleased to see such a positive response from people who stopped to talk 

to us, told us their personal stories of the family memory projects they’re 

working on or just stopped by to say, “I remember floppy disks, I still have 

some lying around.” Our engagement with people at the book festival is one 

of highlights of the year!

Thanks to everyone who visited us at this year’s book festival.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Save Our African American Treasures: Houston and

Dallas

Erin Engle

Recently, I participated in the Save Our African American Treasures 

Program at the Houston Public Library. The Treasures Program is a collections and education initiative of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of 

African American History and Culture.

For the past few years, NMAAHC’s dedicated team has traveled around the 

country providing one-on-one professional consultation to the public on how 

to care for family memorabilia, whether the objects are photographs, clothing 

or other personal treasures. The program also provides an educational 

opportunity for the local community to learn about the new museum (set 

to open on the National Mall in 2015) and to raise awareness about the 

importance of preserving important family heirlooms for future generations.

This is the third time I’ve had the pleasure of joining the program, speaking 

about preserving personal digital information. In Houston, my talk gave 

an overview of the personal digital archiving guidance we developed here 

at the Library. I focused on preserving digital photos (PDF). The audience 

asked some really great questions, some of which my colleagues and I have 

been asked at other public events, like the 2011 National Book Festival and 

Personal Archiving Day.

Lately we’ve been thinking about how to expand our personal digital 

archiving guidance based on the questions and feedback we receive at these 

events. We recently added new resources to our web site How to Scan Your 

Personal Collections (PDF) and How Long Will Digital Storage Media Last?

(PDF). We find one of the best ways to connect with individuals has been 

through this blog.

Frequently on The Signal we talk about our personal experience saving 

our own digital photos, talk about the importance of adding descriptive 

information to our photos and even look more in-depth at descriptive 

metadata for photos.

In Houston, I was asked many questions about transferring old family movies 

on film or VHS tape to the DVD or CD format. The biggest questions: can 

I do this and where do I start?

My response is always, “It’s great you’re thinking about this because that’s 

the first step!” Unless individuals are interested in investing many hours and 

efforts themselves, I usually tell people to search their favorite web browser for 

a service that performs “film transfer” or “VHS conversion” that they would 

feel comfortable using.
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For those individuals who are interested in learning more about how these 

processes work and why it’s important, check out Home Movie Day. It has 

very good information about transfer and preservation information for home 

film and movies.

It’s clear that lots of people want guidance on preserving and digitizing home 

movies.

Imagine starting something from scratch. A home project, a work project, 

or maybe you’re even baking a cake, from scratch. Now imagine what the 

dedicated staff of the new National Museum of African American History 

and Culture are doing – they are building a new museum – literally – from 

the ground up.

The NMAAHC, part of the Smithsonian Institution, is dedicated to 

exploring African American culture and history. Even though it’s scheduled 

to open on the National Mall in 2015, curators, research historians, project 

managers and staff are busy building the collections and creating exhibits.

They are also holding public programs to raise awareness about the new 

museum, and also to educate the public about preserving important, family 

items that may be kept in the back of closets or in the bottom of trunks. Save 

Our African American Treasures is one of these programs, and the Library 

of Congress (and yours truly) is privileged to be a part of this wonderful 

initiative.

On June 18-19, 2011, the Dallas Public Library hosted a weekend-long 

“Treasures” program, featuring one-on-one consultations with expert 

reviewers about caring for personal items. Informal group preservation 

presentations also provided tips on saving items from textiles to 

photographs. This is the third time we’ve participated in the “Treasures” 

program; last year, we were part of the presentations in Topeka, Kansas

and Detroit, Michigan. In Dallas, I gave a talk on Preserving Your Digital 

Memories.

Talking to people about saving their digital memories is something I think 

about often, and I’m trying to find new ways to connect personal collections 

to the larger concept of digital preservation in a meaningful way. We 

think about our family memorabilia tucked away in shoeboxes, scrapbooks 

or photo albums, and it is important to pass them on down through our 

families. Now, as we’re creating more and more memories in digital form, 

we need to start thinking about ensuring that our digital content – the 

memories we’re making today with our digital photo or video cameras – is 

also passed down. These memories are just as important as the shoeboxes full 

of photos, letters, concert tickets and birthday cards that people brought to 

the “Treasures” program. But we don’t have the equivalent storage solution of 

a “digital shoebox.”

In Dallas, I talked to a woman with two small children in tow. I asked her if 

she took a lot of digital photos and videos of her kids and her face lit up as she 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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said, “Of course!” She had these memories on her computer, and she’s been 

thinking about backing them up on an external hard drive. As we talked and 

I gave her some information from NDIIPP’s personal archiving guidance, she 

seemed to understand that backing up your digital content on a hard drive 

isn’t a “digital shoebox.” To make sure that you can access the content in the 

next 5 or 10 years, you need to be vigilant and manage the content on the 

hard drive as well as the drive itself.

The tips we developed are simple, low-level steps to help non-experts work 

through the beginning stages of caring for digital files. But to be honest, 

these tips are not low-effort. Going about saving your digital memories is 

a project. If you haven’t thought about it yet or are just starting to think 

about it, you may be starting from scratch. NDIIPP staff worry about their 

own personal collections – and we’re surrounded by it everyday! But just 

like the staff at the NMAAHC who started building a national museum 

from scratch, it is possible and you can build a meaningful personal digital 

collection that you can share for years to come.

The “Treasures” program is a fantastic public service, bringing a national 

collection initiative to local communities. It’s also a great opportunity for the 

Library and NDIIPP to reach out to a wider audience. We’re learning to talk 

to people in engaging ways about how to keep their personal digital memories 

safe.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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Personal Digital Archiving: An Interview with Jordan

Fields of the Kansas City Public Library

Susan Manus

Here in the Library’s digital preservation program, we have become more 

and more active in the realm of personal digital archiving, and it’s of great 

interest to us when we hear about other such activities happening in libraries 

around the country. For example, the Kansas City Public Library had a 

recent event focused on personal archiving, which included information 

about digital materials.

Jordan Fields, Digital Library Services Manager at the Kansas City Public 

Library, will be presenting a talk at this event called “Preserving Digital 

Images: Caring for Your Photos in the Digital Age”. Fields is an enthusiastic 

advocate, and according to her blog post from last year’s event, it looks like 

the advice they offer is much the same as ours. Before the event, I asked her 

if she could tell us about their event, and about her experience in the area of 

personal digital archiving.

Sue: Tell us a little about your upcoming event.

Jordan: The day-long “Preservation Matters” (2012) event will 

take place at The National Archives at Kansas City and will cover 

preservation basics for both physical and digital materials. Members 

of the public can also bring in an item for one-on-one preservation 

advice. My portion of the seminar will cover preserving digital 

images.

Sue: What other resources do you point people to?

Jordan: The information should look familiar since I always refer 

people back to the Library of Congress information (and we thank 

you, Jordan!). In the past I’ve referred people to the book Organize 

Your Digital Life for basic information and for more advanced 

information I’ve recommended The DAM Book, both of which are 

available for patrons to check out at our library.

Sue: Your event addresses physical as well as digital items. How many 

in your audience are interested in digital materials?

Jordan: Although our seminar covers both physical and digital 

materials, I can only speak to digital preservation and I would 

definitely say that interest in the topic is growing. Last year was the 

first year that we had a digital preservation event for our community, 

and I look forward to seeing how the audience this year is different.
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Sue: What feedback have you gotten from your audience?

Jordan: Most audience members are just grateful to know what they 

need to do with their digital images. There’s not a lot of information 

out there for the non-professionals. As more and more people realize 

how much of what they’ve recorded of their lives exist only in digital 

formats, or experience some sort of loss due to not taking action 

to preserve their files, they’re starting to seek out advice and are 

very appreciative for the expertise that librarians and information 

professionals can offer.

Sue: What do people seem most interested in?

Jordan: Many people are surprised at how fragile digital files are and 

at the amount of work over time it takes to preserve them. It’s much 

more of a commitment than they expect.

Sue: What do you feel is the most important point to make about 

personal digital archiving?

Jordan: Take the time to do the work to preserve your memories!

Organize what you have now and then set up a system to stay on top 

of it. You don’t have to preserve everything, but if you don’t preserve 

anything, then you risk losing so much.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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What Do Teenagers Know About Digital

Preservation? Actually, More Than You Think... Butch Lazorchak

It’s many adults’ worst nightmare: how to entertain and (try to) educate 

thirty 8th graders for an hour? Especially when the subject matter is as potentially complex as how to preserve digital information.

Well, the first thing to do is to try and think like the teenagers who visited 

the Library on May 13, 2011, from the Imagine Schools South Lake Middle 

School in Clermont, Fl., as part of a class trip to Washington, DC.

Lucky for us this wasn’t the first time we’ve engaged with students on the 

subject of digital culture and its preservation. Back in the summer of 2009 

we hosted a visiting group of high schoolers from Arlington, Va., a visit that 

provided the grist for the “Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation” 

video.

The insightful video (seriously, go watch it soon) explored teens’ knowledge 

of digital preservation in general, as well as their ideas of what digital items 

should be saved, who’s responsible for saving them and what the challenges 

are in saving them.

Since then, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation 

Program at the Library has participated in outreach events at the National 

Book Festival and has hosted two Personal Archiving Day events at the 

Library, all of which helped us understand what digital preservation issues 

were of concern to the general public.

Still, outreach to adults (and near-adults) is a little different than working 

with 8th graders, so with input provided by Library Educational Resource 

Specialist Cheryl Lederle-Ensign, we crafted a program that concentrated on 

a subject near and dear to the students’ hearts: digital photos.

A Pew Internet and American Life Project slide set from June 2010 explodes 

many of the myths about teen cell phone and social network use, noting that 

after texting (of course) photo-taking and sharing is the most popular feature 

on teens’ cell phones. Kids aren’t alone here: we’ve noted a significant interest 

in digital photography issues at our other outreach events, so we know this is 

an area of interest and concern for many.

With that in mind, we tailored our presentation to help the kids understand 

how to capture, describe and preserve their own digital photos. We started 

off by querying the South Lake kids on their photo-taking and saving 

activities, beginning with the devices they use to take their pictures, 

then investigating their storage and sharing strategies. Throughout the 

conversation we shared handy tips they could use at home to help make their 

pictures last a good, long time.
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There was a roughly even split between students who used digital cameras 

and those who used phones to take their pictures, with one student still using 

film (!). The split is important, because the primary distribution (and possibly 

only long-term storage) strategy for many of the phone users was to upload 

their photos to a social networking site such as Facebook.

We explained some of the issues with using a social network site as a primary 

storage option (history has shown that those sites don’t stick around forever), 

and talked about how it’s best to save your photos across a range of devices 

(thumb drives, CDs, external hard drives, online storage) and geographies 

(your house in Florida, your friend’s house across town, your grandma’s house 

in Seattle).

And we were pleasantly surprised by the students’ degree of knowledge on 

the issues. Most of them recognized that their digital photos were “at-risk” 

in some way (one had filled her camera by shooting 800 photos in one day 

and was worried about how to save them when she ran out of space), and 

many had perfectly reasonable back-up and replication strategies already in 

place. Our presentation “teased-out” more detail on these strategies, and got 

both the students and their parental chaperones to think a little harder about 

saving their photos with something that resembled a long-term strategy.

Through its public outreach NDIIPP is trying to influence behavior 

on a number of levels, first and foremost by raising awareness of digital 

preservation issues and spurring people to take personal action to preserve 

their own materials in the current absence of comprehensive tools to help 

them do so. After all, the personal photographs of the students at South Lake 

could become the valuable cultural heritage materials of tomorrow, but only if 

the students take care of them first.

We’ll talk more about personal archiving tools and strategies in the future, 

but in the meantime we take our hats off to the students of South Lake and 

welcome other student groups to come visit us!
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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From Chaos to Order: Diverse Communities Interested in

Personal Digital Archiving Resources

Erin Engle

I’ve written before about the personal digital archiving talks I’ve given and 

about some of our events. So it seems fitting I write about a recent talk I gave 

at a meeting of the Washington DC Chapter of the National Association of 

Professional Organizers.

Earlier this week, I attended a NAPO membership meeting to talk about 

our personal digital archiving guidance related to managing and preserving 

digital photographs. I was particularly excited to speak to this group, in part, 

because I’m fan of organizing...anything. I also see many commonalities 

between this professional community and the librarian and archivist 

community.

Professional organizers use principles and expertise learned through 

coursework and experience to enhance the lives of their clients. They 

design organizing systems and teach organizing or life skills. Generally 

speaking, as information professionals, librarians and archivists are trained 

in the organization and management of services or materials. They collect, 

record and maintain books, files, photographs and other documents for an 

institution or organization. In a few short words: professional organizers and 

information professionals turn chaos into order.

Because of the similar nature of the skills required to perform both activities, 

this opportunity gave me a chance to think about our guidance in a different 

way: how the small-business community could benefit from our personal 

digital archiving guidance.

Our guidance is geared toward helping individuals preserve personal digital 

information. We’ve also marketed our guidance to librarians and archivists 

through an awareness campaign. It strikes me that the small business 

community can also use our advice to excellent advantage.

Just as people are creating, sharing and handing down digital memories, 

individuals who run their own business have a vested or economic interest 

in ensuring their digital information is kept safe and preserved for as long as 

necessary. Our guidance can provide a starting point for these individuals 

who may have not thought about personal digital preservation, and I’m 

looking forward to exploring more effective ways to deliver our tips to this 

community.
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The Challenge of Teaching Personal Archiving

Ellysa Stern Cahoy

“What’s in your library?”

I love to ask this question of the college students that I teach, as they are 

(whether they realize it or not) continually building their own personal 

libraries on their laptops, their iPads, even their mobile phones.

As online information proliferates, the physical library is receding in 

importance. Personal libraries – collections of articles, photos, documents, 

email and other information – are of primary importance now. My job as 

an academic librarian has been refocused towards helping my users navigate, 

mine and build their personal information collections.

While today’s graduate students (or new faculty members) may not want to 

hear that they are now also their own personal librarian, they are. Whether 

you are a student or not, everyone is actively building collections of personal 

and/or professional information. Increasingly, the job of librarians is to 

help our users effectively build, search and organize their own personal and 

scholarly information collections.

In The Long Term Fate of Our Digital Belongings: Toward a Service Model 

for Personal Archives, Cathy Marshall identified the four greatest user 

challenges with regard to storing and organizing personal online materials:

• Accumulation (too many copies of too many things).

• Distribution (multiple copies in many places, online and on 

storage devices).

• Curation (what to save and where to save it).

• Long-term access (the ever-lingering challenge of migrating 

materials to new formats when old formats expire).

These challenges are significant and impact the lifespan of current knowledge 

and historical preservation. If we expect our children and future generations 

to preserve knowledge, sustained education on how to archive personal 

information collections is essential.

I am working with Pennsylvania public librarians on a grant to develop 

digital literacies in public library staff. The goal is for all librarians and 

library staff to feel at ease with the technology that their patrons use, such as 

iPads, digital cameras and laptops.

Public libraries are a magnet for patron questions about technology, and 

while many public library staff are technology whizzes, not everyone feels 

comfortable helping patrons download photos from their camera. Our grant 

aims to develop that comfort zone with technology, as well as provide food 

for thought on ways to engage people in telling their personal stories through 
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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technology with photos, video and more.

As I work with public librarians and my own students, I realize that just 

as central as learning how to use technology is helping people navigate 

Marshall’s user challenges for personal archiving. Here’s how can we help 

people:

• Understand how to better manage their personal collections.

• Manage the accumulation of photos and documents (and 

duplicate copies).

• Manage the distribution of that collection.

• Decide what to keep and what to purge.

• Move materials to new formats when needed.

• Above all, perhaps, is the importance of printing out and making physical materials, whether for professional or sentimental 

reasons.

Indeed, we are now all our own librarians. While it is an exciting time, the 

information cloud leveled so that we all can build our own collections, it is 

also a weighty challenge and one that I look forward to helping my students 

and others confront and tackle.
Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

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About the Authors

Mike Ashenfelder

Digital Media Project Coordinator, NDIIPP, Library of Congress

Jefferson Bailey

Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council, 

former Fellow with NDIIPP

Ellysa Stern Cahoy

Education & Behavioral Sciences Librarian Instruction Coordinator, Penn 

State University Libraries

Erin Engle

Digital Archivist, NDIIPP, Library of Congress

Leslie Johnston

Acting Director of NDIIPP, Library of Congress

Sarah Kim

School of Information, University of Texas at Austin.

Butch Lazorchak

Digital Archivist, NDIIPP, Library of Congress

Bill LeFurgy

Digital Initiatives Manager, NDIIPP, Library of Congress

Susan Manus

Digital Media Project Coordinator, NDIIPP, Library of Congress

Keri A. Myers

Former volunteer archivist, NDIIPP, Library of Congress

Tess Webre

Intern, NDIIPP, Library of Congress

Barry Wheeler

Digital Media Project Coordinator, OSI, Library of Congress