Review: The Complete Guide to Personal Digital Archiving
Rachel King
Brianna H. Marshall, ed. The Complete Guide to Personal Digital Archiving. London: Facet Publishing, 2018. 276 pages. Paper. £59.95
While I understand that I’m outing myself as a bit of a nerd, I was thrilled when I received Brianna H. Marshall’s edited anthology The Complete Guide to Personal Archiving in the mail. That’s partially because I think the subject matter is important in a general way, but also because it’s filling a need that I have personally experienced. You see, a couple years ago, I was putting together a presentation on personal digital archiving for a group of journalists, and I realized in the course of my research that most advice on personal digital archiving dealt mainly with the preservation of personal mementos, not on the full spectrum — both personal and professional — of people’s digital lives. The concept of personal digital archiving focused, quite logically, on the preservation of digital photos, home video, and personal documents. It’s understandable that these items would be seen as being of the greatest importance, because virtually everyone has family snapshots and videos as well as letters and legal documents that need preserving. On the other hand, I was going to be talking specifically to journalists — that is, people who might need to preserve articles, blogs, web-based portfolios, podcasts, social media feeds on a variety of platforms, and email exchanges with sources. I wanted to help them get their digital lives in order, and I really wanted to send them to one place for all of that information — but wasn’t able to find a source on personal digital archiving that was sufficiently comprehensive. This is the guide — that one source — that I knew I needed back then, and that I am grateful to have it now.
Not that it replaces what has come before. And, in fact, there are some excellent resources that belong on every librarian and archivist’s personal digital archiving bookshelf. I’ve frequently consulted (and highly recommend) the Library of Congress’ excellent online guide as well as Donald T. Hawkins’ Personal Archiving, Evan Carroll and John Romano’s Your Digital Afterlife, and Melody Condron’s Managing the Digital You. (Also mentioned in Marshall’s book is Denise May Levenick’s How to Archive Family Keepsakes — an excellent resource, no doubt, but one with which I am not personally familiar.)
Condron is a contributor to this volume. (Full disclosure: I had occasion to contact her when I was putting together my presentation for journalists, and found her to be knowledgeable, helpful, and gracious.) She has contributed this anthology’s chapter on the archiving of social media. Having already written a book on the topic of personal digital archiving, Condron is a recognized expert who speaks with authority, and the same can be said for the other writers whose work appears here. Yvonne Ng, who wrote the chapter on archiving audiovisual materials is the coauthor of the “Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video.” The rest of the volume’s contributors possess similarly impressive levels of expertise. At every point in this book, I felt that I was in excellent hands.
The first section of the book covers best practices for a variety of digital preservation challenges: photos, audio and video, and web content. Part II offers case studies of community archiving such as Washington D.C.’s Public Library’s Memory Lab, the Queens Library’s Queens Memory program, and Washington State University’s Plateau People’s Web Portal. Part III shifts from community spaces to more academic/professional ones, with examples of personal digital archiving initiatives for students, scholars, and artists. Part IV looks at the social and ethical implications of personal digital archives, including digital estates, digital privacy, corporate control of cloud-based personal archives, as well as self-archiving for under-represented groups. One of the book’s strengths is the way it offers both practical information as well as inspiration. This one volume offers nuts-and-bolts details on how to preserve a variety of formats, advice on how to effectively impart this information to the communities we serve, as well as more reflective pieces about how our digital information is currently being used and how it might evolve over time. For example, in her autoethnography of black millennial self-archiving practices Camille Thomas writes, “The process of personal information management or personal digital archiving can be a transformative act that means self and community care, especially for those who have not historically been able to participate in record creation” (228). In their essay on community-based digital archiving, Lotus Norton-Wisla and Michael Wynne touch on similar themes, observing that “Personal digital archiving projects that start at an individual level can take on new meaning if individuals and families are given the opportunity to collaborate with others in their community” (123). What these essays are proposing is an alternative to the digital dark age that seems inevitable when individuals cede control to the corporate platforms that host their personal digital content. Instead they offer a vision of a golden age in which individuals learn digital preservation skills that help them collaborate in creating community archives that are more open and inclusive than anything we have seen before.
Not every byte of digital information is going to survive into the future, just as not every scrap of analog information has come down to us from the past. But the days when librarians and archivists were the primary curators and conservators of written and recorded cultural heritage are over. The enormous amount of digital information produced and its innate fragility and instability are too great a challenge for a small group of academically-trained professionals. It seems to me that the great challenge for these professionals — librarians and archivists — is not to preserve everything of importance, but to enable everyone in our society to preserve what is important to them. The Complete Guide to Personal Digital Archiving will help us to meet that challenge.
Rachel P. King is Adjunct Librarian at New York City College of Technology
