Some questions about digital preservation

I haven’t gotten to read much for fun this weekend. Instead I am steeped in articles on personal information management, digital preservation, personal archives, and email preservation/curation. It is fascinating stuff! This reading is part of my research for my final project for my library school class this quarter on digital preservation.

I am finding that personal information management is a relatively new field of interest to information scientists. I am also finding that information scientists haven’t done much to educate or help the average person manage and preserve his/her digital life. There are a number of projects past and current but next to nothing that has been released into the wild that people can actually use. Most everything is designed for institutional settings and forgets about you and me. Which is a shame because I imagine there might be lots of people out there who would like to preserve photos and email correspondence and other digital items to be able to share with or pass on to family members.

This has prompted me to put together a little informal survey. Please feel free to put your answers in the comments or email me. If you don’t want to answer the survey questions but still have thoughts on the subject, please leave a comment. I want to get an idea if and how people are thinking about this kind of stuff both for my own curiosity and because I might be able to use some of the information in my paper (if that is ok with you if it isn’t, please be sure to say so).

An Informal Survey on Digital Preservation

Have you ever lost digital documents (email, images, music, text files, etc) because you didn’t know how to save them short-term or long-term?Are you interested in preserving your digital files so that in 10, 20, 30+ years they will still be accessible?Do you know anything about digital preservation practices? If so, how did you learn about it?If not, would you be willing to learn? How would you prefer to learn? A website, book, class, manual that accompanies software that will help you preserve your digital documents, or some other way?Do you have a personal email or other data preservation plan? If so, can you briefly outline your plan?If not, can you briefly explain why?If there were an easy way to preserve email correspondence (and important email attachments) for both the short and long-term, would you be interested in it?If the preservation system came in the form of open source (free) software, how likely would you be to use it?If the preservation system came in the form of licensed software that you had to pay for would you use it and how much would you be willing to pay for it?If the preservation system requested additional information from you in the process of converting your files for preservation such as keyword tags, subject information if the subject line is blank, and basic information regarding any embedded hyperlinks or attached files or images, how likely would you be to provide that information and why?Do you have any questions of additional comments?

Thanks!

Avid reader and stockpiler of books and soon to be librarian.

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