[Personal_archives] Starting off personal digital archives dialogue

[Hobbs, Catherine]

Good morning,

I'd like to welcome all of you to the first day of the third semi-annual SISPA listserv dialogue.  This time the topic is Personal Digital Archives.  

It is a real pleasure to welcome Cathy Marshall of Microsoft into our midst as our guest expert.  Good morning Cathy!  Thank you so much for agreeing to join us this week.

Cathy: in rereading your articles, I was reminded what a revelation is was to me that you as a researcher for a computer company were acknowledging the chaotic, provisional, "haphazard" way in which people have been creating and storing "personal digital belongings" (a wonderful phrase).  In fact, the idea of "personal digital belongings" gets right at the issue of people treating their records, pictures and audio recordings like their stuff and not like records in an archival sense when they are creating and using them.  Archivists, I think, are well served by this idea. Frankly, I find it quite amusing that your research shows us (computer users) to be the procrastinators which we know ourselves to be in terms of sorting our stuff, for example.  The idea of having a digital place to put your digital valuables like a box under the bed, is very evocative and too you have acknowledged one of the main difficulties for creators of files (and I think archivists might agree that this translates to the analogue world) that most of our digital belongings fall not into the realm of "extremely valuable" or worthless but into the grey area in between.  

People have certain ideas about what they have and what to do with it based on the ideas we've evolved with concerning our physical belongings while, at the same time, the digital poses new challenges (such as not "re-encountering things and triggering memories because the belongings are not as visible and we are simply overwhelming in terms of quantity).  It inspires me to know you are investigating issues arising from human psychology (what we treasure, how we treat it and what we do with things when we don't have the time) and trying to re-relate them to how we think in order to make effective self-archiving strategies within software.  

Another true revelation for archivists arising from your work is the acknowledgement that creators of records are creating and storing their belongings in a decentralized way.  This has huge implications for archivists approaching creators of archives and trying to trace their stores and what they believe they have.  

I, for one, have a lot of questions arising from your articles and I don't want to jump right into the middle of things.  Perhaps, for a start Cathy, you might reflect a bit further on the psychological aspects of how people create and relate to their digital belongings or enlarge on the foundations for your research findings.  Did you find you were making further distinctions between users in terms of their comfort with the digital?  For example did it matter to you whether people were early adopters of technology or belonged to a certain demographic group or profession? It seems that artists feature strongly within your research findings, for example.

Catherine  



Catherine Hobbs,
Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language) / Archiviste, Archives littéraires de langue anglaise
Documentary Heritage Collection Sector / Secteur de la collection du patrimoine documentaire 
Library and Archives Canada / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada 
Place de la Cité, Room / Piece 598, 
550, boul. de la Cité, Gatineau (QC), K1A 0N4
catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca
Téléphone /Telephone 819-934-8331
Télécopieur / Facsimile 819-934-8333

Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada  www.collectionscanada.gc.ca