I am relentlessly optimistic about the future of personal digital archiving. There is simply too much at stake, in my mind, to feel anything but hopeful.
Let’s face it, though: it’s hard. A well-regarded expert who has spent years studying personal digital habits tells me that people just won’t invest time and effort to preserve their personal files. Individuals are said to be hopelessly passive in this space: they are content to let content spread helter-skelter among the shifting assortment of devices and services they use to create and share digital material.
3 things, by tedxdeusto, on Flickr
Sadly, this is the way it is for many people. Photos pile up on smartphones. Social media platforms come and go. Email and text messages reside in siloed accounts. Passive dependency on technology that doesn’t care about the future is begging for a world-wide personal digital disaster.
Unlike my learned colleague, however, I don’t see this situation as inevitable. It can be improved–in fact, it has to be improved. It may take time and the disappearance of digital memories for countless families, but eventually the loss will be so keenly felt that people will demand a solution.
So all we need to do is change the world. Here are three things I think need to happen to make digital archiving easier for people and communities.
1. Greater awareness. I’ve talked with hundreds of people at outreach events and the large majority haven’t heard much about managing personal digital files. Most people also need instruction about how to take the most basic steps, such as making duplicate copies on separate media. And many who have thought about personal digital archiving associate it strictly with digitizing analog items, not with preserving the resulting digital copies. The good news is that people quickly understand the issue when it is clearly explained.
2. Radically better tools and services. Irony abounds here: in the midst of an amazing revolution in computer technology, there is a near total lack of systems designed with digital preservation in mind. Instead, we have technology seemingly designed to work against digital preservation. The biggest single issue is that we are encouraged to scatter content so broadly among so many different and changing services that it practically guarantees loss. We need programs to automatically capture, organize and keep our content securely under our control.
3. Attention to scale. There are two scales of concern. One is the huge (and rapidly growing) number of people around the world who create huge (and rapidly growing) volumes of digital content. A generation ago, a family would be lucky to have a few hundred photographs, letters and other memory materials. Today, millions of people have billions of personal digital files, and preservation solutions need to be democratic and multi-national. The other scale is technological. As a recent article points out, current limits on internet bandwidth, storage practices and storage costs hinder personal digital archiving–and the problem is set to get worse with a new series of “lifelogging” devices coming onto the market. Information technology needs to make a giant leap to bridge the gap.
What do you think? Is personal digital archiving always going to be too hard for people? If not, what has to change?