Digital Archiving At Home - Helpful Hints

The issue of what to do with your ever-growing backlog of images, music, and files on all our computers sometimes feels like a time bomb: how long will they last? How can we save them from the fate of the files on the floppy disks we threw away years ago?  As an archivist, I still feel like we have a long way to go on perfecting this. My mantra is that digital is about access, not preservation. But that mantra in and of itself is flawed. We have to figure it out. From a personal perspective, I've not had a hard copy of any of my own pictures in over 5 or 6 years now.

So what do you do? I'd recommend reviewing what they have to say on these sites:

• Library of Congress's Guidelines for Digital Preservation
• Paradigm's Guidelines

I particularly liked the video on the LC site.

Thank you kindly to Abe for the pointers on these resources.

-Jessica

Comments

[Javis Lounsbury]

It's not that one is more important over the other, so I get how you said your mantra is flawed. Though in archiving, I have more problems with choosing which materials to store.