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We don’t usually repost other’s content here, but this graphic is such a perfect illustration about the challenge of personal digital archiving that it deserves special attention. It’s from Doghouse Diaries.

We write frequently on this blog about the value of personal digital archiving–empowering people to pass on digital memories to their families and others. We’ve always seen public libraries as key allies in promoting personal archiving, and have highlighted libraries that undertake outreach and training in this area. There is a related role for public libraries and […]

The growth of computing technology during the previous three decades has resulted in a large amount of content being created in digital form. As their creators retire or pass away, an increasing number of personal data collections, in the form of digital media and complete computer systems, are being offered to the academic institutional archive. For the digital curator or archivist, the handling and processing of such digital material represents a considerable challenge, requiring development of new processes and procedures. This paper outlines how digital forensic methods, developed by the law enforcement and legal community, may be applied by academic digital archives. It goes on to describe the strategic and practical decisions that should be made to introduce forensic methods within an existing curatorial infrastructure and how different techniques, such as forensic hashing, timeline analysis and data carving, may be used to collect information of a greater breadth and scope than may be gathered through manual activities.

This one's amusing! But it shows how bad science can be rooted out by reanalyzing data.

How to talk people into handing over their digital archives, and why it's important.

Do you value your digital content? Nearly everyone is creating things with computers, and some do it without any concern for its value. Others recognize its current value but think little about what it could mean to them in the future, and...

Huge repositories of data collected by Internet companies are not accessible to scientists, leading some to complain that studies based on these data can’t be peer-reviewed.

The Library of Congress and its digital preservation partners from the federal, library, creative, publishing, technology, and copyright communities are working to develop a national strategy to collect, archive, and preserve digital content.

In the shaky and often promiscuous business of the Web, where companies fold and merge at astonishing speed, you can’t always trust that Web sites will take long-term care of your digital treasures.

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

Nowadays when we prepare a will, we have the added responsibility of leaving instructions to our loved ones about what to do with our online things after we die. Bequeathing has grown more complicated. Much of our online content consists of our writings – email, text, tweets, blogs, wikis and more – and our loved […]

Over the past few years I have been organizing my family’s digital videos and digitizing our old  videocassettes. All along I have tried to follow the personal digital archiving advice that my colleagues and I publish about organizing and backing up your personal collections. Now that I have collected, organized and stored our videos on […]

One year after Twitter donated its archives, the Library of Congress is still building the infrastructure to make the data accessible to researchers.

Simon Barron: The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians – they can't be held accountable