And no, I don’t mean scrapbooking.
A quick search on “Personal Archiving” in Google does not turn up much – mostly database products, information on organizing your emails, and the like. But I think a comprehensive plan for personal archiving is more important than ever.
In the act of photographing my sketchbooks, I’ve been thinking about why I’m doing it a lot. It takes a lot of time, and I end up with something that maybe 1 or two people will look at (ok, maybe 4 or 5). I’m adding to this tremendous amount of information already out there. This article: connect.educause.edu/folksonomy/personal_archiving
talks about information overload as a result of millions of people doing the same exact thing: publishing as much as they can about themselves on the internet.
I finally realized that I’m doing it mostly for myself. I want to be able to access this stuff digitally, and I want a record out there in case… well I don’t know. In case everything disappears. Sometimes I feel like this is in preparation for getting rid of everything, too- I can let go easier if I know I have a record to look at, even if I don’t have the actual object. It’s easier to throw it away when I have something to jog my memory.
For me, archiving is driven by a fundamental distrust of my memory- I don’t trust myself enough to accurately store information, but I trust myself to retrieve it.
So lately I have been making an effort to make a personal archive – the goal is to eventually have something I can burn on a DVD and keep off site, with publicly viewable things online. (obviously I don’t wan to publish my journals and the like online). This sounds easy enough, but it ignores the fact that I keep accumulating stuff. So I also need a system of archiving – the how, when and where. I’ll probably try to do a periodic update – say, twice a year. Ideally, I could have a place set up all the time so I could just snap a picture of an important document and then throw the original away, but I don’t have the room to do that, nor do I have an extra camera I could dedicate to doing that.
The first step in creating a digital archive is figuring out the software and filing system to use.