[Personal_archives] Starting off personal digital archives dialogue

[Rodney Carter]

Hello all,

Suffering a potentially devastating crash of my work computer late last week
- I am still waiting for word on the status of my data, fingers are crossed
- I have been reflecting on some of the challenges, issues and possibilities
raised by Cathy's articles in a very concrete way. I know I backed up the
"important" work files, but am pretty sure I lost most of the personal items
that have accumulated on my cpu after 5 years, as well as all my email
which, for some strange reason, I never thought to include in the backups. I
keep thinking to myself, "was that kept? hmmm, it was a work in progress and
on the desktop so perhaps not. oh no..." Despite thinking that I was rather
on top of things, it seems I may have overlooked a great deal of records,
what Cathy calls "the countless items that are in the middle, the quotidian
artefacts of everyday life..." The music collection, the articles saved to
be read at a later point, the untold amounts of notes, images and other
things that I can't even recall having on the computer at the moment but
will no doubt go back one day to find it and realize it is lost. And this
experience has certainly made me think of the limitations of my digital
possessions at home. From the research Cathy describes, it certainly sounds
like I am not alone in having given insufficient thought to my personal
digital archive, but that doesn’t make me feel much better about the work
that needs to be done to safeguard it.



Already there are a few themes emerging that I hope we can investigate this
week - the idea of re-encountering which I find extremely intriguing; the
implications of benign neglect in the analogue and digital worlds;
decentralization of storages; and, as Catherine & Heather have already
flagged, the psychology behind the creation, use, and storage of digital
artefacts. I am looking forward to hearing the groups thoughts and
experiences as we traverse the "delicate tightrope between euphoria...and
uncertainty..." in the digital age.



Rodney




On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:37 AM, <home at queensu.ca> wrote:

> Hello Cathy and everyone..
>
> I just wanted to say that I'm very interested in your thoughts
> on Catherine's question about user groups, but would like to take it one
> step further regarding "artists'" use of technology and any problems you may
> have encountered with this section of the population not only being early
> adopters.. but also early adapters of technology and the ramifications of
> this on their ability to access/control/migrate their digital belongings in
> the long-term?
>
> Heather
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Hobbs, Catherine" <catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca>
> Date: Monday, April 27, 2009 9:11 am
> Subject: [Personal_archives] Starting off personal digital archives
> dialogue
> To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
>
> > 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
> >
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> > Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
> > http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/personal_archives
> >
>
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