Preservation and Access for Personal Digital Archives and Literary Papers

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Preservation and Access for Personal Digital
Archives and Literary Papers

• Neil Beagrie
• British Library/JISC
• Banks Lecture University of Texas
• April 2006

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A Modern Archive
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Focus of this lecture

• Past paper? current hybrid ? future
  pre-dominantly digital
• Personal collections are often the foundation and
  lifeblood of most museum, library, and archive
  collections.
• What about future digital collections?
• What changes/remains relevant?

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Some Trends and Issues

• Shift from letters to email
• More multi-media in personal archives
• More informal Web publication and communication
• Fragility/obsolescence of digital information
  (digital preservation)
• Selection and retention when digital
• Relationships with authors

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Overview

• Relevance to British Library
• Digital Preservation
• Technical trends
• Research projects
• Global services
• Conclusions

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British Library
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British Library Personal Archives

• Relevant (digital) special collections in BL
• Literary papers and correspondence
• History of science
• Web-archiving (blogs)
• Oral history
• Considering development of digital lives theme
• Synergies between different projects and
  collecting areas inter-action with digital
  preservation or access research

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Literary letters

• New York Times Essay 4 September 2005

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Web-archiving - blogs

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POLITICS web-archiving
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Oral History Sound Archive

• Millennium Memory Bank
• 1500 interviews individual life memories
• National Life Story Collection
• Themed collections of individual oral histories
  eg steel industry

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Digital Preservation
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Digital Preservation

• digital documents last forever or five years,
  which ever comes first (Jeff Rothenberg 1997)
• BBC Domesday System

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Digital Preservation

• Digital memory over a human lifetime
• Challenges-
• Software and hardware obsolescence
• Media life and data loss
• Ephemeral data eg web-pages, email
• More pro-active preservation strategies needed

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Technical Trends
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Digital Storage
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Computer Processing Power and Storage
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Generation C

• Mass market consumer trend - refers to a
  perceptible emerging consumer shift, from
  consumption to personal creation, customization,
  and co-production of digital content
  www.trendwatching.com
• Spectrum Consultants 2004 Future UK Internet
  market trends. Final report for DCMS predicts
• growth in weblogging, personal online journals,
  personal journalism operating on a mass scale and
  interpersonal links such as picture, video and
  music sharing

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Implications

• Individuals will soon be able to store the
  equivalent of texts in a large academic research
  library on a PC
• Becoming cheaper to capture than select, cheaper
  to retrieve than to organise
• Much easier for individuals to publish online
  with high-quality capture/editing and
  presentation tools (although creative quality may
  still vary)

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Research
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Bushs memex 1945
A memex is a device in which an individual stores
all his books, records, and communications, and
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted
with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an
enlarged intimate supplement to his
memory. Vannevar Bush1945.
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Microsoft MyLifeBits

• Within 5-10 years, personal stores of a
  terabyte will cost of a few hundred dollars
  hence a person will can be immortal in terms of
  the media theyve encountered. For famous
  people, one will be able to access their entire
  life. (Bell Gray, Microsoft 2000)
• Microsoft Research Project MyLifeBits aiming
  for continuous lifetime storage and associated
  software research
• http//research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/M
  yLifeBits.aspx

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MyLifeBits video capture
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Memories for Life

• Much of this information will be associated with
  particular people (e.g. emails, digital images,
  web browsing histories), which raises the
  question of how such digital memories can be
  stored over periods of decades. Serious issues
  include search, indexing and organisation
  privacy extracting knowledge from potentially
  vast and heterogeneous repositoriesrepresentation
  techniques that will be robust over periods of
  time (Memories for Life Grand Challenge
  Cognitive Systems Inter Action Conference 2003)

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Memories for Life Researchhttp//www.memoriesfo
rlife.org

• Multi-disciplinary interests and range of
  potential applications medical as well as
  cultural
• Memories for Life A Review of the Science and
  Technology - Journal of Royal Society Interface
  forthcoming

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Selection, retention, disposal, forgetting

• For digital memory should we collect/keep
  everything?
• Technically possible. Changed rationale for
  selection
• forgetting more than deletion - disposal,
  redaction (blackouts), time-activated access,
  anomalisation, deep storage
• Narative - Biographer/auto-biographical tools

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PARADIGM

• Project on digital papers of politicians
• http//www.paradigm.ac.uk/ 

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PARADIGM

• 2 year project by libraries at Universities of
  Oxford and Manchester
• focussing on papers of conservative and labour
  politicians
• Early issues
• Greater privacy concerns when digital
• Avoiding digital archaeology or total loss
• Reluctance to deposit early externally
• More life-time support and tools?

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Global Services for Personal Archiving and Access
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Ourmedia.org

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Flickr www.flickr.com
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Conclusions
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General Conclusions

• Digital archives will have major impacts on
  special collections and libraries
• More multi-media, broader content
• Need combination of new and traditional
  skills/approaches to selection, preservation
• The growing abundance of data and collection will
  present numerous challenges for individuals
• New types of global services for them
• Libraries need to engage with digital papers and
  archives (and engage much earlier)

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For the British Library

• The Library has created a cross-divisional
  digital preservation team
• Co-ordinating new EU project (Planets) focussing
  on developing digital preservation toolset
• Digital Lives research theme under discussion
• May need pro-active elements outreach/support
  and different approaches on private/public
  material

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Further Information

• Article in D-Lib June 2005
• http//www.dlib.org/dlib/june05/beagrie/06beagrie.
  html