Even if you're not pinin', your "legacy contact" won't be able to read your messages.

My mother and father have long made it clear what their wishes are for when their times come—except for when it comes to their online footprints.

Outline of a personal digital archiving activity suitable for a lay audience. "Find the person" in the heap of disorganized whatever.

This paper addresses the ways in which our cultural understanding of death is changed by the digital afterlife and the affordances of the Internet. Since the advent of the digital age, we now interact, create and conduct business online leaving a digital footprint that remains even after we die; there is now a growing popular cultural awareness of this and online start–ups have been quick to capitalise on our need to make for provision for our digital assets. Social platforms have allowed for Web memorialisation, emergence of new grieving practices and expansion of traditional mourning rituals, however, there are a number of issues related to digital assets and these online mourning practices. At present, there is no consensus as to how social media company policies on deceased user accounts are handled, an area that is further muddied by legal issues of ownership and privacy. Furthermore user interface design does not currently make provision for the death of users and the social processes around online mourning were found to be complex and at times damaging to the bereaved. The expansion of our digital lives, the end of ‘sequestered death’, new mourning practices and issues associated with these changes, have, this paper argues, expanded, changed, and irreversibly complicated our cultural understanding of death as mediated through the Internet and communication technologies.

The following is a guest post from Samantha Thomason,  web developer at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and chair of the Virginia Library Association’s Local History, Genealogy and Oral History Forum.  Because personal digital archiving covers so much territory — from scanning to cloud storage to estate planning — it is easy to […]

Wow, ANIMORPHS-NOVEL.RTF? Just gonna, uh, go through and delete that from all my archives real quick.

The complete solution to backup, download and browse photos, videos on Flickr. Download sets (albums), favorites, groups, explore photos & more on Mac or Windows

Would Susan Sontag have wanted her life and computer files analyzed like this? Would anyone?

I’m cleaning out my office in preparation for retiring on March 7. I’ve accumulated a few mementos during my career, and moving them out stirs up memories. One of my favorite keepsakes is a framed 1986 poster from the National Archives and Records Administration that proclaims “Our Records, Your Responsibilities.” It offers little in the […]

In 2004 Andy Hertzfeld  was building  Folklore.org , his amazing now-famous website devoted to first-person stories of the earliest days of ...

‘The world’s most intriguing documents now lie comatose inside a 1995-ish laptop… ’