Digital Lives: how people create, manipulate and store their personal digital archives

The personal archives of scholars and other eminent
people have long been kept in repositories such as
the British Library, and include correspondence, notebooks,
drafts of published papers, photographs etc.
Needless to say, in recent years these collections have
become ever more ‘digital’, as individuals are capturing
and storing increasing amounts of digital information
about or for themselves, including documents, portfolios
of work, digital images, blogs, personal web pages
and audio and video recordings (Summers & John 2001;
Beagrie, 2005; John, 2005; Thomas & Martin, 2006).
Not only the media and formats but also the contents of
works created by individuals are changing. For example
in the history of science, laboratory and field notebooks
are changing drastically as research councils move towards
supporting more standardised forms of recording
e-science. We need to understand and address these issues
now if future historians, biographers and curators
are to be able to make sense of life in the early twentyfirst
century. There is a real danger otherwise that we
will lose whole swathes of personal, family and cultural
memory.
Personal information collections and management have
been the focus of attention of researchers for many years,
particularly in the field of Human-Computer Interaction
(for an early example, see Malone, 1983). However, the
rapid rise in digital applications and storage capacity has
both stimulated interest in this field (see, e.g. Kaye et. al,
2006, Jones, 2007; Bruce et al, 2004) and also opened
up a new research area within it directed at personal digital
archives, a term used here to refer to these informal,
diverse, and expanding memory collections created or
acquired and accumulated and maintained by individuals
and belonging to them, rather than to their institution or
other place of work. It is the focus of a major study ‘Digital
Lives’, which will be the subject of the presentation.
Digital Lives research project
The Digital Lives research project is being led by the
British Library and funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities
Research Council, focusing on such collections and
their relationship with research repositories. It brings
together expert curators and practitioners in digital preservation,
digital manuscripts, literary collections, webarchiving,
history of science, and oral history from the
British Library with researchers in the School of Library,
Archive and Information Studies at University College
London and The Centre for Information Technology
and Law at the University of Bristol. The project aims
to explore how individuals manage their personal digital
archives, in order to inform curators and archivists
who will be entrusted with the personal collections of
eminent people that will be left to them in future. We are
seeking to clarify our understanding of an enormously
complex and changing environment, engage with major
issues, and evaluate radical new practices and tools that
could assist curators in the future.
The initial phase of the project is complete, and will
form the backdrop to the presentation. For this, we used
in-depth interviews to explore the views, practices and
experiences of a number of eminent individuals in the
fields of politics, the arts and the sciences, plus an equal
number of young or mid-career professional practitioners
whose works and personal archives may be of interest
to future scholars. Questions covered the history
of the interviewee’s experience with computers and ICT,
training undertaken, manipulating files, backing up and
transfer, collaborative work, extent and nature of any
digital archive and the motivation behind decisions to
keep or discard documents. Attitudes and perceptions of
digital artifacts generally were also elicited.
This phase of the research (the preliminary findings of
which have been reported by Williams et al, 2008) elicited
a fascinating variety of experiences, behaviours and
approaches, ranging from the poet who ignores word
processing, electing instead to write all his drafts by
hand, only committing the very final copy to a computer,
to the geologist who forwards emails to himself so that
the subject line can be changed, to the politician who
has not digitised his audio diary but has it catalogued
and cross-referenced online. Overall, the breadth of disciplines,
backgrounds, ages and experiences of the individuals
interviewed gave such contrasting and varied
accounts that it is almost impossible to generalise findings. One thing is already very clear, however. The rise
of Web 2.0 and document/data sharing and distribution
over the internet has lead to large parts of individuals’
digital assets (photographs, blog entries, even email archives)
being hosted by servers geographically remote
and with no guarantee of permanence by the service provider
– creating immense problems for future curation
and access. The amount of poorly named and inconsistently
stored draft documents – sometimes with a ‘final’
version being lost in the digital ocean of one’s ‘C:’ Drive
will be another challenge.
Two surveys were undertaken, both online, developed
from the issues raised and responses given in the qualitative
phase of the research. One was to the general public,
and the other to a sample of academics from both the
humanities and sciences. We wished to explore differences
in the online behaviours of different demographic
and other groupings. It may be, for example, that scientists
behave quite differently, in terms of their creation
and management of their digital assets from humanities
scholars; or that novice computer users operate in a fundamentally
different way from experts. Initial analysis
suggests, for example, that back-up and retrieval behaviour
is different between genders. The presentation will
integrate qualitative and quantitative findings from rigorous
and sophisticated statistical analyses facilitated by
SPSS software (quantitative) and from HyperResearch,
(qualitative). This will provide an initial though deep
and comprehensive examination of digital information
behaviour.
Conclusion
It need only be said in conclusion, as the presentation
will present findings from work presently in progress,
that the way different people and groupings perceive,
manipulate and store digital media has wide ranging implications
for creative or scholarly activity, for the design
and functionality of future software applications, and for
the capture and care of personal digital archives by repositories
and their future access by humanities scholars
and others. The presentation should be of wide appeal to
a ‘digital humanities’ audience.
References
Beagrie, N (2005), “Plenty of room at the bottom? Personal
digital libraries and collections”, D-Lib Magazine,
11(6) http://www.dlib.org/june05/beagrie.html
Bruce, H, Jones, W Dumais, S (2004) “Information behaviour
that keeps found things found” Information Research,
10(1) paper 207 Available online: http://informationr.
net/ir/10-1/paper207.html (accessed 12.10.08)
John, J L (2005) Because topics often fade: letters, essays,
notes, digital manuscripts and other unpublished
works pp399-422 in Narrow Roads of Gene Land Volume
3 Last Words, edited by M Ridley Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Jones, W (2007) Personal information management In B
Cronin (Ed.), Annual review of information science and
technology Medford, NJ: Information Today pp453-504
Kaye, J, with J Vetis, A Avery, A Dafoe S David, L Onaga,
I Rosero, T Pinch (2006) To have and to hold: exploring
the personal archive CHI Proceedings, Personal
Information Management, April 22-27 2006 Montreal,
2006
Malone, T W (1983) how do people organize their desks?
Implications for the design of office information systems
ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 1(1)
pp99-112
Summers, A & John, J L (2001) The W D Hamilton Archive
at the British Library Ethology, Ecology & Evolution
13, pp373-384
Thomas, S, & Martin, J (2006) Using the papers of contemporary
British politicians as a testbed for the preservation
of digital personal archives Journal of the Society
of Archivists, 27(1) pp29-56
Williams P, Dean K, Rowlands I, John JL (2008) Digital
Lives: report of interviews with the creators of personal
digital collections Ariadne 55 http://www.ariadne.
ac.uk/issue55/williams-et-al/ (posted 25.04.08; accessed
13.11.08)