Personal Digital Archiving 2018

Personal archiving is first and foremost an effort to preserve memories of the past. Through the preservation of photographs, documents, and other important personal objects, personal collections represent individual creators as well as the family and community groups they occupy. Community and participatory archives, in which community members contribute to archival collection, description, and preservation practices, are attempts to document their members’ individual and collective narratives.

The Mass. Memories Road Show is one such participatory archive project that works to “bring together local residents of all ages, ethnicities, races and backgrounds in lively and thoughtfully planned public events that celebrate each person's family history and contribution to the community” (Mass. Memories, 2016, p. 4). During Mass. Memories events, participants contribute photos that reflect themselves and their families in their community; those photos are digitized and video interviews documenting the story behind such photos are recorded.

The focus of our research are the stories behind the objects contributed to these community archives. Our research aims to explore the personal context of community archive participants by unveiling the stories behind the objects the participants contribute to the community archives. We believe that such research will allow for a nuanced understanding of the layers of memories created and fostered through participatory archive efforts.

To reach this nuanced understanding of the Mass. Memories participants’ narratives, we categorized the objects contributed and revealed themes from the experiences, memories, and sentiments evoked when participants discussed the objects. Our analysis results indicate that how people perceive and appraise their past life experiences and memories within the community (including their personal connections with the community, involvement with community events and organizations, reflection on community history, and their identity as a community member) has an influence on the formation of community and participatory archives.

Reference:
The Mass. Memories Road Show. (2016). The Mass. Memories Road Show Project Handbook: A Planning Guide for Local Communities. Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Boston, Joseph P. Healey Library.

This presentation will describe the efforts of gathering oral histories, family trees, medical history, and behavioral genograms of the presenter's Chinese family members residing in mainland China. It will address changing cultural barriers to personal archiving such as technology, language, medical advancements, and war. To conclude, the talk will address the function of personal archiving on immigrant identity formation. 

Out of recognition and frustration with traditional archival outreach, the Houston Archives Collective was found in the summer of 2017 to bridge gaps between institutionalized outreach efforts and the needs of the Houston community.

This presentation will address non-hierarchical approaches for disseminating preservation knowledge, best-practices in archives, and community support across  Houston's communities: the arts, education, activism, and LGBTQ. 

Indigenous scholar and distinguished Tl'eeyegge Hut'aane (Koyukon Athabascan) linguist, Dr. Eliza Jones, of Koyukuk, Alaska, wished for the youth of the future to know their language and traditional ways. Since 1970 she has diligently documented the stories, songs, and genealogy of the people in Interior Alaska. Audio, video, text and photographic data are being digitized and shared through the Mukurtu Content Management System platform on the Internet. The Alaska Native Language Archive at the University of Alaska Fairbank, Washington State University, K-12 school Yukon-Koyukuk School District, and community members collaborate on this project. The variety and nature of Dr. Jones’ files provide an excellent test case for controlled and mediated access to primary materials.

Panel discussion with presenters.

Scan Days - John Sarnowski
ScanDay events aim to digitize and catalog letters, photos, souvenirs, and other artifacts related to local history. This lightning talk highligts events held around the state of Wisconsin at public libraries and churches.

“To Save Press 9”: voicemails as audio worth preserving - Lucy Rosenbloom
While we may not always have the opportunity to sit down with our loved ones to record oral histories, voicemails provide us with day-to-day, candid, and personal recordings from our friends and family. These messages left on our cell phones as digital audio files allow us to preserve the voice and words of the people in our lives. This presentation will show an example of a simple “DIY” archive of voicemails using a smartphone and email.

Mobile Digitization Kits: A Potential Tool for Personal Archiving - Ruohoa Han
Mobile digitization kits are portable collections of tools for converting analog materials to digital formats. They often include essential digitization hardware (e.g., scanners, digital cameras, and laptops) and software (e.g. Adobe Photoshop), as well as digitization knowledge and expertise. In contrast to traditional digitization models, in which materials are often brought to institutions and professionals for digitization, mobile digitization kits enable digitization to be “taken out” and brought to communities and individuals instead. In this way, they provide not only practical opportunities for individuals to get their important personal materials digitized, but also interesting potential in demystifying, educating about, and democratizing digitization. This lightning talk will provide a quick overview of mobile digitization kits and how they can be a potentially innovative tool for personal archiving, using the Indigitization project and the Culture in Transit project as examples of how such kits can be designed and utilized in different ways to bring individuals, communities, personal/community archiving, and digitization together.

Permanent Digital Preservation for All - Permanent Legacy Foundation’s Permanent.org - Robert Friedman

The Memory Lab Network at Houston Public Library - Matt Richardson
Houston Public Library will soon begin offering digital preservation services to the public as a part of the Memory Lab Network. This project emerges from National Leadership Grant awarded to DC Public Library (DCPL), in partnership with the Public Library Association (PLA), to build Memory Lab programs in seven public libraries across the U.S. based on the DCPL Memory Lab model. This lightning talk will discuss the program from the perspective of one of the recently selected and newly trained project partners.

Family History at the Houston Public Library / Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research - Joy Oria
Learn about different ways of digitizing your family history materials through the Clayton Library.

This session will discuss how the everyday experiences of black youth and marginalized people are often overlooked in archived narratives, even in personal lives. It will outline how the presenter’s personal experiences with PDA informed an examination of how we educate others on personal digital archiving. Often we think about transferring institutional values onto our communities, but this session will also showcase projects in which community values are central.

Initially using digitization to make historical photographs, oral histories, and moving images accessible to the public in her role as a professional archivist, she found it necessary to apply those same concepts as family historian, genealogist, and keeper of the family archives. As the eldest child, the tasks fell to her naturally, but when serving as executrix for her parents' estate (2016-2017), she came into possession of several generations of correspondence, photographs, film, audiotapes, and documents. Beyond the physical aspects of preserving these items, she was also challenged with the need to share the family history with the younger generation. A grandmother of six, she chose to use both digital and physical methods to preserve and disseminate images, along with their context in the family history, to her kin. Having lost two of her three siblings (1994, 2002), she had the additional challenge of providing her perspective and knowledge of the childhoods of both these siblings to their children. While a seemingly daunting task to accomplish, she streamlined the process by setting project priorities and deadlines to get results. Software, apps, and hardware used in the project will also be discussed.

The 1980s were an interesting time to be a comics fan. The previous decade saw well-known creators leaving the industry’s two big companies (Marvel and DC) for new, independent publishers. Cheerful, do-gooding superheroes gave way to more personal (and, in some cases, darker character studies) in this market, paving the way for a wave of do-it-yourself comics publishing. In the early ‘80s, my father, Gary S. Carlson, stepped into this arena with “Megaton,” a self-published anthology comic featuring talented artists and writers he had met at Midwestern comic conventions. Megaton lasted eight issues, folding at the end of the decade as the market glutted with independent comics and the big companies plucked his stable of collaborators. He stayed in comics for another three decades, but the Megaton chapter was over. In 2016, my father began inventorying his Megaton files with the goal of creating a “remastered” digital version of his comic. This presentation will share my father’s experiences in personal digital archiving as he confronts the now-obsolete techniques that produced the original comics, faces disintegrating master materials, and juggles several different surviving sources of varying quality. The presentation will also discuss the importance of preserving DIY comics and Megaton’s effect on the founding of Image Comics, a powerhouse 1990s publisher.

Personal experience presenters panel discussion.

This 3-presentation panel will focus on the work and efforts put forth by the University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program. Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage is a program to locate, preserve and make available the written legacy of Latinas and Latinos in the United States since colonial times until 1960. Through 25 years of successful work Recovery has not only being able to inscribe the excluded history of Latinas/os, but also has created an inclusive and vast digital repository that facilitates scholarship in this area of studies. The presentations in this panel will focus on the importance of recovery work in the writing, teaching, and understanding of history. We will consider how local personal archives have helped to fill in the gaps of mainstream history. Presentations in this panel will also include a discussion of the process of creating the first Digital Humanities Research programming focused on US Latina/o Studies. We will detail the goals and challenges of this mission, as well as the importance of educating the community in digital methods that preserve and disseminate minority voices. 

There is a corner of the web that tells us stories — non-fiction stories, specifically—which let us in on each other’s realities, ask us to slow down and contemplate. These works have many names: immersives, interactive documentaries (aka i-docs) or transmedia productions. Their makers draw from a large tool set: from playful game interactions, to networked, participatory, or data storytelling. Regardless of their underlying media or methods, however, these works share a common challenge: The average life span of a web page is 100 days.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has been exploring web archiving options since 2011 and over the past year has put a special emphasis on preserving non-fiction interactives, an intricate mode of online storytelling that is celebrated at the annual documentary festival IDFA. Together with the festival's DocLab section, Sound and Vision has talked to producers as well as individual creators and compiled an overview of potential solutions for safeguarding content created at the cusp of advancing technologies. 

In this presentation, we will briefly introduce the Bertillon system of criminal identification as a means of exploring the functions of records created both by and about incarcerated individuals, as well as archival distinctions between institutional and personal records. Although the Bertillon system was implemented for a relatively short period of time (roughly 1890 until the end of World War I), the practice reverberates through contemporary methods of criminal identification and documentation.

These prison records, created for institutional purposes to curb recidivism, are a type of personal record that is not created by the individual but is nonetheless personal. Through our work with Bertillon records over the past three years, we’ve traced the movement of individual identification cards from the moment of creation through to their present-day archival custody.

This work has raised a number of questions and concerns for our research team, which we will explore in our presentation:
- How do our interpretations of privacy change depending on context?
- What is the role of the archive in mediating access to these types of personal records? Are we responsible for controlling access to these materials, especially if our own ethical concerns deviate from the official access policies of the institution where the records actually reside?
- What is the role of recordkeeping in perpetuating the notion of invisible labor?
- How do official recordkeeping practices impact particularly vulnerable populations?  

Panel discussion with presenters.

Public libraries have long served their communities as stewards of local history. They have traditionally collected print materials that document their regions, but the movement towards increasingly digital and personal publishing has left gaps in the historical record—gaps in the memory of who these communities are, how they communicate, and what they may learn from one another. Due to technical challenges and lack of available training, few public libraries build archives of community history as it is represented on the World Wide Web in particular, though the web has for many years now been where community members connect and share.

In 2017, the Internet Archive received grants for a two-year “Community Webs” project to address this gap in collections and services by providing education, training, and tools to enable 27 public libraries to build collections of historically-valuable, web-published materials documenting their local communities. Speakers representing two of these libraries will discuss how they approach the curatorial and outreach challenges related to building localized special collections representative of the diverse populations that they serve. In particular, they will demonstrate how they include both internal stakeholders at their institutions as well as public stakeholders in the selection process of archiving community websites. They will share the digital literacy takeaways from sessions offered to the public and the lessons taken forward in the planning of future sessions.

Natalie Milbrodt from Queens Public Library, Emily Ward from East Baton Rouge Parish Library and Karl Blumenthal from the Internet Archive will give short individual presentations, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

The Memex, first proposed in 1945, was to be the ultimate personal archive. In a desk-sized device, users would be able to store all their correspondence, reports, and libraries. Add-on devices like a head-mounted camera, a note-taking tablet, and a voice recorder would allow for supplementary data input. Most importantly, users would be able to link together arbitrary items in their archives and then use these connections to navigate through their library.

Unfortunately, the Memex was never built but the device has had a large impact on the history of computing and hypertext, giving many a powerful vision of how computers should be able to serve humans.

I’ve also been inspired. I’m building a modern digital version of a Memex in an attempt to create a complete personal digital archive of my life. So far, my system has every message I’ve exchanged over the last fifteen years, every photo I’ve taken, years of browser history, and much more. This data is sourced through a few dozen importers I’ve written that pull data from the different digital sources and services I use on a daily basis. A front-end app lets me organize, visualize, and search across these minute-by-minute records of my life.

I’ll give a historical overview of the Memex and its impact on history. I’ll follow this by giving a demo of my personal digital archiving system. I’ll also discuss some of the challenge I’ve had with things like choosing a schema or trying to extract data from providers that aren’t too keen on giving it up.

In 2015, Scott Carlson and Norie Guthrie started Indie Preserves. Based on survey data culled from DIY and Indie music label owners, they created a blog that offered physical and digital preservation tips with the goal of helping those that they surveyed. After presenting at SXSW, the duo realized that their intended audience may not have shared their preservation enthusiasm. This presentation explores this journey: what the duo learned in their study, how they tried to help, how they interpreted their failure, and how they moved forward with new approaches. 

DC Public Library (DCPL) has partnered with the Public Library Association and the Library of Congress to bring Memory Lab digital preservation programs to seven public libraries across the U.S. Over one year Memory Lab Network partners are receiving training, mentoring, and financial support to create digitization stations and curriculum to build public knowledge and skills around the complex and paralyzing problems of personal digital archiving through their own Memory Lab programs.  The partner libraries and DCPL will form the foundation of the Memory Lab Network, a support system of libraries that can assist, advise, and build on each others’ innovations, challenges, and growing first-hand expertise. By expanding the number of Memory Lab programs nationally, creating variation among those labs, and assessing their successes, challenges, failures, the Memory Lab Network will create a model that is robust, flexible, and adoptable by public libraries across the world. Through publication and centralized project documentation, workflows, and program information open to all, the network will lower the barriers for libraries to learn about and consider adding digital preservation tools and programs to their own public services, providing yet more opportunity for iteration, improvement, and adoption of Memory Labs.  The project is funded through a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

At a time when archivists are seeking more diversification and social inclusion within the documentary record, have we given pause to consider who and what really constitutes personal archives?

Digital technologies have cut across the everyday to empower people from all walks of life to more easily record and communicate their daily activities. But in this era of digital self-documentation, and with it an unprecedented potential of capturing documentary heritage created by everyday individuals, do archivists truly have a sense of where the value lies within this new frontier?

This presentation highlights important questions that archivists should be asking themselves when dealing with archival appraisal, acquisition and custody in the digital present. In a discussion covering issues such as the essentializing and epitomizing of complex social phenomena by archivists, the costs of custody-based archival practices, as well as the idea of the personal fonds or collection in the digital age, the presenters ultimately suggest that traditional practices of archiving the lives of individuals in society must change if archivists are to become conscientious facilitators of digital documentary heritage.

Roles & Opportunities presenters panel discussion.