n.the practice of preserving one’s own digital records of continuing valueMarshall, McCown, and Nelson 2007, 155This breakdown demonstrates the wisdom of developing methods of personal digital archiving that anticipate the benign neglect of distributed and augmented materials that we described in the previous section. Many individuals are unaware of the specific IT practices of their ISPs (for example, how regularly their files are backed up or whether they are backed up at all); nor do they keep careful track of the status of their various accounts or the ISPs policies regarding account dormancy.Marshall 2008The invisible burden of stewardship is a major personal digital archiving challenge. Benign neglect is a reasonably effective policy for the care of physical assets, but a dangerous strategy for their digital equivalents. It is rare for people to remember all the digital things they have amassed and where they have put them, so they can’t even begin to estimate how much work it would be to “look at [my photos] every decade or so.”Cushing 2010, 305Archivists could utilize the concept of pre-custodial intervention as a doorway through which to enter the discussion of personal digital archiving with individuals.Marshall 2011, 97In other words, personal digital archiving will boil down to nothing more profound than deciding what we should keep, how and where we should store it, and what sorts of work people will have to do to keep their digital collections alive.Becker and Nogues 2012, 509The real danger regarding writers’ personal digital archiving practices is the unchecked, unsystematic proliferation of digital files across various storage and access locations, as this proliferation and the lack of digital and archival instruction that propels it has already and will continue to lead to the loss of important archival material.Ashenfelder 2013, 21Over 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 hard drives, I have a new challenge: backing the files up.Brown 2015Personal digital archiving consists of saving and archiving digital materials and managing them so they will be available for future use. While this is not always easy, it is vital if we want to maintain our digital lives.Redwine 2015, 2An important part of personal digital archiving involves determining, either individually or with the help of a curatorial institution, which parts of an individual’s ‘digital stuff’ are worth trying to save permanently. The more actively one selects, manages and cares for personal digital archives, the more likely those are to survive the ravages of time on technology. Similarly, the more control an individual has over their personal archives, the greater their ability to save only what they intend.
