I recently became obsessed with Ancestry.com and have been diligently trying to archive family pictures and memories. This informative book couldn't have come at a better time. ( )

Personal Archiving edited by Don Hawkins is a very good introductory compilation of essays on the state of the art for personal digital archiving. Don gathered an impressive crew of contributors. He begins with a foreword from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive and tops it off with a compelling look at the future of the field by Clifford Lynch of the Coalition of Networked Information. The authors are experts who come from a variety of fields (most from library, archives, academics, and computer science).

Throughout the work the authors emphasize the value of digitizing and preserving our archives, the need to make effective decisions on what to keep and work with and what to let go, and the need to work through complications. Digital archives make possible sharing and copying so there is no “last copy” to be lost. At the same time, digital copies themselves must be refreshed because of the impermanence of the digital media.

The products discussed and reviewed are best considered as prototypes and models for the way to approach problems, as the individual products may be short-lived, but there will be something else doing that same function in the future. An example pointed to by one of the earlier reviewers is 1000memories being absorbed into Ancestry.com This is the very problem with long-term data storage alluded to by Brewster Kahle in the foreword.

With my current interest in genealogy and preserving family records and working with others who are newer to technology, I found Danielle Conklin’s chapter on “Personal Archiving for Individuals and Families” useful. She shares issues faced by four individuals tackling their own archiving projects. She makes the case of the need for digital archiving, considerations in tackling a project, and the challenges individuals face. The human challenges are real.

Clifford Lynch raises intriguing issues to contemplate in his look at the future of personal digital archiving looking at such areas as the breadth of potential personal digital records of the future, digital estate planning , and further when the private becomes public and the relationship of personal archiving to the collective cultural record.

I highly recommend this volume. ( )

I love my on-line life, but have often worried that our digital traces don't have the permanence of old fashioned letters and documents. I have many friends who are librarians, archivists and genealogists who I plan to direct towards this book. This is a useful text, not just for a professional archivist, but business people and individuals who want tighter control and preservation of their digital record. I foresee that this is a volume that will likely need a revised edition every few years to stay on top of our constantly changing digital world. ( )

This collection of papers centers on the archiving and retrieval of digital material. In most cases, the authors are dealing with contemporary materials – e-mails, Facebook posts, Twitter feeds, digital photos, and the like. Since these media have largely displaced traditional personal written material such as letters and diaries, the digital deluge has a significant impact on archivists and scholars who will want to access material in the future.

When offered this volume by the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program, I confess I did not pay attention to the book’s subtitle, “Preserving Our Digital Heritage.” As a genealogist and family historian, I was looking for guidance on the preservation of physical records as well as material that I have scanned and photographed. While there were a few papers that dealt with my primary interest, it was tangential rather than direct. Nonetheless, this was a worthwhile read, offering the views of professional archivists about the challenges that digital records present. These challenges range from assuring that the digital material continues to be accessible in the future despite technological change, transitory repositories, and neglect, making sense of what the personal digital archive says about its author, and separating the material that is truly private to the author and what he or she would consider public. All of these are thorny issues, as the authors point out, and no easy solution is given. A certain amount of tech jargon is present which drove me to the dictionary on occasion, but the material is generally thoughtfully presented.

One anecdote from the book made a lasting impression on me. An author of one of the papers managed, with a great deal of difficulty, to replicate the computer files of his late father. The operating system and file formats of the computer’s hard drive were obsolete, but with help of a colleague he was able to replicate exactly what his father’s computer desktop looked like, and he was set to start opening files. But before he started, he realized the dangers. What if the material on his father’s computer was embarrassing or in some way showed him to be other than his son remembered him? He’s never opened the files.

One of the hazards to writing about the technological world is that the digital information that we create in a few years will surely be different from those discussed in this book, as will the storage and retrieval systems available. Indeed, one of the web sites described, 1000Memories, is no longer available, having been absorbed into Ancestry.com. Nonetheless, the core issues that this book investigates will still be with us. ( )

Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage Edited by Donald T. Hawkins is essentially the first text book in the new field of Personal Digital Archiving (PDA). It was largely informed by the presentations at three conference on the subject of PDA and subsequent conversations among interested professionals in a number of fields closely related to this specific topic. I can certainly see this book used as a text as the basis for discussions in seminars and workshops, especially at the graduate level of study related to family history, library, archival activities, information technology and several other fields.

The first few contributed chapters would be useful to individuals actually wanting to pursue PDA on their own as well as for professionals. The middle chapters share several research projects that help define various aspects of the emerging PDA field of research and study. The final couple of chapters attempt to look forward and suggest the first specific types of research to be undertaken. The final chapter, in particular, encourages us each to broaden our view as to the many aspects of the PDA process that must be considered - some not even mentioned in previous chapters. As a retired academic involved during my career in attempting to develop a new field of study, I fully appreciated this presentation. It helped me read every word even though some of the middle chapters were more technical than I would have preferred.

As noted by earlier reviewers, most of us have much of our intellectual property in digital form, now, and are seriously wondering what to do with it. Does it have value? We certainly believe some of it does, but how do we handle it. What about the material created and held by political figures, corporation executives, writers and artists, other digital content creators. This book does a fine job of asking the right questions and beginning the long, tedious discussion, research and practice cycle that will provide the answers. ( )