[Personal_archives] distinctions among user types and benign neglect as stewardship mode

[Cathy Marshall]

Hi all,

Thanks for such an interesting start to our online discussions!

I'm going to begin with the question about distinctions among different types of users, especially since it's come up many times when I've presented my work (e.g. when I've talked to product people inside my company).

When I design a study, I'm always on a fence about who to include (and, by the same token, who to exclude). Sometimes I've used professional recruiters to find people for particular studies. That technique involves writing a 'screener', a series of questions that determine who is included in the participant pool. (e.g. "How long have you been using a computer at home?" or "Do you have broadband access at home?" or "Have you used a digital camera within the last week?" might all be asked of a potential participant, and might require answers of greater than 10 years, yes, and yes, respectively in order to actually participate in the study). Those studies usually bring me into contact with computer users I can't imagine meeting any other way (I didn't realize this until I'd started doing studies this way-sometimes we are blind to the limits of our own social networks). You can get some of the same effects by posting an ad in Craigslist, and doing your own screening for qualified participants. Sometimes I've used the people around me in studies-friends of friends, family of co-workers, and so on-and that of course introduces various built-in biases, some of them not well articulated (for example, education level or ethnicity). And sometimes I've been opportunistic, drawing on participants who are simply available by circumstance. For example, I did a study with Michael Nelson and Frank McCown that drew on people who were using a Web site recovery tool that Frank and Michael had developed-so these were people who had already lost something and were sophisticated enough to look for a tool to recover their stuff.

This is a long-winded way of saying, I've tried to look at the practices of diverse people. So it's interesting that it appears that I've had a relative over-representation of artists and designers in studies; I didn't realize this until Catherine and Heather pointed it out. I think this is because artists are usually quite facile at making digital things, and have stuff they care about, but aren't necessarily computer experts running RAID arrays. What you're also noticing is that I like to derive my *examples* from artists' work, just because it's more fun to talk about these examples. ;^)

That said, are there distinctions that matter here? Instead of burying these five points under an avalanche of prose (my usual MO), I'm just going to list some things I noticed.

1) Many people that we talked to in the course of doing broad studies are a great deal more adept at using and understanding particular applications/devices than they are at understanding the computing platform (and its abstractions such as the file system and file formats) as a whole. So the person who is a Photoshop or Excel expert might not understand how to burn a DVD.

2) People whose main creative output is tied up in the digital form (e.g. photographers; filmmakers) may well drive the first generation of real digital archiving products. (That is, writers can just print out novels; a digital negative is always going to have to be preserved digitally). That said, some things we'd like to hang onto-e.g. the literary letter-seem to be at risk because of this.

3) I currently believe that the four challenges-the accumulation of digital belongings; a trend toward distributed content; to expect minimal digital stewardship; and the need for new types of re-retrieval and rediscovery mechanisms-are relatively universal. That is, I saw these challenges everywhere. Are things simpler if people are doing less (i.e. are late adopters)? Probably. But they're there, in nascent form. (For example, the person who doesn't yet trust the network for storage may have stuff stored on unlabeled floppy disks. But... this same person might also have Web email that he doesn't even know is stored remotely.) I suspect all of these phenomena have implications for professional archivists.

4) Early adopters may well have format problems that are more acute than the rest of us. That is, they use various digital forms before the formats stabilize. That said, they're usually the population that's the most comfortable poking around and looking for conversion utilities on the web. I did see hobbyist photographers storing digital negatives in their cameras' nonstandardized RAW format, a dangerous practice.


5) Personal archiving is social, but more complicated than it is in the physical world. For example, the home archivist is often not the same person as the home IT provider (although home archivist and home IT provider are both ad hoc, fluid roles). And from the opposite perspective, the capable IT person may have little interest in creating an intelligible artifact-the home IT person might well create a DVD, but might not label it. Do they work together? Sometimes, and sometimes they work at cross purposes to one another.



Rodney-I'm sorry to hear about your recent crash-I'm going to say something now, and I'm curious what you'll think about it:



I've noticed a somewhat puzzling pattern: people seem to be relying on disk crashes, technology failure, and periodic obsolescence as a way of pruning their collections. It's not that loss doesn't bother them; it's rather that loss makes their collections more tractable. The accumulated weight of these digital belongings is swept away, so that the home computer users can focus their attention on the present. This cycle of accumulation and accidental loss might underlie explanations that consumers offer for failing to backup their computers. In the end, people may be unhappy about data loss, but they shrug it off, all too frequently saying exactly the same thing:



"I mean, if we would've had a fire, you just move on."

All for tonight. Let me know what you think.

best,
Cathy

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