Personal Digital Archiving 2015 in NYC — “Call for Papers” Deadline Approaching

New York City panorama

New-york-city by irot2 on deviantart.com.

The Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2015 will take place in New York City for the first time. The conference will be hosted by our NDIIPP and NDSA partners at New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program April 24-26, 2015. Presentation submissions for Personal Digital Archiving are due Monday, December 8th, 2014 by 11:59 pm EST.

This year’s conference will differ slightly from the Personal Digital Archiving Conferences of previous years (see listings below). There will be two full days of presentations focused on a set of themes; a third day will be set aside for workshops covering useful digital tools.

The conference program committee seeks proposals for:
– ten- to twenty-minute presentations
– five-minute lightning talks
– posters (including demos)
– workshops, particularly those emphasizing software tools (to take place on the third day).

The program committee will try to cluster shorter presentations into panels and encourage discussion among the panelists. For the day of workshops, they are seeking hands-­on learning focused on useful digital tools. They anticipate four half-­day workshops, with two in the morning and two in the afternoon.

Personal Digital Archiving 2015 invites proposals on the full range of topics relevant to personal digital archiving, with particular interest in papers and presentations around community groups, activist groups and their use of digital media, as well as personal/familial collections and home­-brewed digital solutions.

Presentations might address challenges, such as:
– Ubiquitous recording devices – such as cell phones — for videos and photos
– Action cameras (such as GoPro)
– Cloud storage
– Social media (Vine, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc.)
– Email
– Open­-source, low-cost digital tools
– Tracking and sharing personal health data
– Community outreach and economic models from an organizational perspective
– Security and issues of access, encryption, reliability and safety
– Archival and library issues associated with collection, appraisal, ingest and description
– Migration of content from obsolete or outdated storage media.

Submissions should include:
– The title of the presentation;
– For 10 to ­20­ minute presentations, a 300 ­word abstract;
– For lightning talks and posters, a 150 to ­300 word abstract;
– For workshop proposals, a 150 to ­300 word curriculum overview, including approximate number of hours needed, what tools will be taught, and computing infrastructure requirements;
– For panel proposals, a 150­ to 300 word overview of the topic and suggestions for additional presenters;
– A brief biographical sketch or CV (no more than 2 pages).

Submit your conference proposals to http://bit.ly/1t8x3Td.

For more information on previous PDA conferences, please visit:

Registration, program, housing and other information will be posted in early 2015. For further information, email personaldigitalarchiving [at] gmail.com.

Personal Digital Archiving 2015 is co­-sponsored by NYU’s Moving Image Archiving & Preservation program, the NYU Libraries and the Coalition for Networked Information.