Personal digital recordkeeping: note to self
Archivist, researcher and natural born recordkeeper that I am, it is perhaps surprising that I am a bit slack when it comes to personal digital recordkeeping.
I say a bit, because in some areas I’m quite good. I have a twelve year email archive that is still accessible and in regular use, and I migrated my Masters thesis (early 1990s) from an early word processing format on 5¼ inch discs. A copy is sitting on my laptop as I write.
But I last backed up contents of said laptop in February!
And worse, I have more than two years of certain aspects of my life invested in Flickr, and have yet to investigate ways of extracting all that data into a format I control and will be able to access in twenty years time.
Some while back I pondered the problem of archiving text messages. My solution, ultimately, was to photograph the particular messages of value to me. Where are those photos now? On Flickr and on my laptop…
Greater minds than mine Gunga Din have been thinking about these issues, and I leave you with this reference for now:
Paradigm: Workbook on Personal Digital Papers, Bodleian Library, 2007. (That’s the title of the web version. The hard copy version is Paradigm: Workbook on Personal Digital Archives, which, I think, is more meaningful.)