The Personal Digital Archiving 2015 Conference

The Personal Digital Archiving 2015 Conference. Mike Ashenfelder. Library of Congress Signal. August 3, 2015.   
     The conference is about preserving digital collections outside the scope of large cultural institutions, including family history, community history, genealogy and digital humanities.  Digital video is important as evidence and cultural records, especially of news events. Every individual, family and community should consider the cultural importance of their digital photos.

• “The value of the artifact – and what we keep trying to tell young people – is that they are the authors of a history in the making.” 
• The archives people are creating are "exactly the same kinds of images that filmmakers like us use to make a documentary. People in the future will be looking through their images to try to understand who we are today.” 
• "Personal photos mingle with family personal photos to become a larger archive, a family archive. Facebook has spawned a “local history” phenomena, where members of a community post their personal photos and comments, and the individual personal contributions congeal organically into a community history site."
• Increasingly we hear from colleges and universities, usually — though not exclusively — from their librarians, expressing concern that students and faculty may not be aware of the need to preserve their digital stuff.

Instead of commercial products at the conference, presentations, workshops and posters shared practical information about projects that used open-source tools:
A few of the many presentations at the conference include:

• Activating the Family Photograph Album for the Digital Age
• Photos die, unless we talk about them
• Artists and vendors: Models for Collaboration in the Digital Preservation of Audiovisual Materials
• Does BitTorrent + Private Trackers = The New Film Archive? 
• 5.25 inch floppy disks 
• An Exploration of the Potential Impact of Wearable Computing Technologies on Digital Archiving and Preservation 
• How Online Sociality and Free Terabytes are Shaping Personal Digital Archiving 
• “Yeah, I do think it's very important that identifying information be stored with the file. The big problem is that without that - too much context is lost.”
• “I feel that this is the greatest thing [Social Media Platforms] to happen to photography since the first camera was created."

 

Digital Preservation Matters.