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The topic of personal archives has mainly been discussed by two research traditions in information science: archives and records management, and personal information management. The purpose of this paper is to compare a corpus of the archival literature written by the archival community with the concepts and challenges posed by Catherine Marshall, who exemplifies the personal information management approach. Many of the personal digital archiving challenges that Marshall identifies are related to discussions within the archival community.

In order to demonstrate the similarities between Marshall's work with the archival discussion about personal archiving, Marshall's challenges, tasks and attributes of personal digital archiving were compared with a total of 33 articles from two library and information science databases.

Many of the personal digital archiving challenges that Marshall identifies are related to discussions in the archival community. The author suggests that certain aspects of the archival literature may be utilized to address Marshall's identified challenges. Lastly, future collaborations between members of the archival community and members of the personal information management community may prove useful in addressing the challenges of personal digital archiving

The paper demonstrates that two areas of information science share ideas about how to address the issues related to personal archives, but rarely consult one another when writing about personal digital archiving. The author highlights the archives and records management tradition in an attempt to introduce the literature to the broader discussion on personal digital archives being had by the personal information management tradition.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the associations of personal archiving behaviors to factors and challenges that have been assumed to affect personal digital archiving strategies.

This study created an online survey to understand general patterns of personal digital archiving practices and related phenomena. The survey was employed to investigate to what extent people show a certain behavior or feel certain factors and challenge when archiving personal digital content.

Some of the findings of this study regarding specific personal digital archiving practices were in accordance with existing studies. However, the associations between digital archiving challenges and archiving practices were not observed statistically significantly as assumed in previous studies. General technology efficacy and the awareness of the importance of personal records appeared to influence personal archiving practices.

This study used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. As this is not a commonly used internet service, the workers here could have higher than average levels of internet efficacy. This possibility may have affected the demographics, and the survey responses may be biased in this respect.

As the study results suggest that technology efficacy and personal heritage awareness are the influencing factors of personal digital archiving, these are the areas where information professionals can involve in assisting users for future cultural heritage.

This is the first study that develops measures for personal digital archiving related practices and perceptions that the previous qualitative studies have identified. With these measures, it examines the general status of individuals’ archiving strategies and the overall associations of digital archiving challenges as well as looking into other technological and personal factors.

This paper aims to set out a coherent intellectual framework to help to better understand how people create, organise, manage, use and dispose of their personal digital archives. The context for this is the increasing volume and diversity of digital information objects being captured and stored by individuals in their personal capacities and the need to find ways to preserve this material for posterity.

The research presented here is based on literature analysis, the questions having been informed by an earlier series of in‐depth interviews. The approach taken is to synthesise key concepts from the computer science, information management, and archives and records management literatures. Key concepts from the existing literature in computer science, information management, and archives and records management were elicited and synthesised to create a coherent document lifecycle narrative.

Individuals exhibit great diversity in terms of personal information management and digital archiving practice at just about every point in the digital information cycle: much more so than is the case in formal repositories. Practices exhibited are not always conducive to efficient document management. This represents a very keen challenge for professional curatorial practice.

Little is known about how individuals manage digital information resources in their personal capacity, outside of their corporate or institutional employment. Yet both individuals on their own and professional curators on behalf of repositories are increasingly being faced with the challenge of how to deal with digital media. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to a growing debate in this area.

Personal information management from the perspective of personal digital archives is a surprisingly under‐researched area and the proposed model adopts an archival information lifecycle approach. It seeks to apply and promote an archivally‐oriented personal information management.

The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which self-tracking data have meaning and value in and after the life of the creator, including how such data could become part of the larger historical record, curated in an institutional archive. In doing so, the article expands upon existing shared interests among researchers working in the areas of self-tracking, human–computer interaction and archival science.

A total of 18 people who had self-tracked for six months or more were recruited for the study. Participants completed a survey which gathered demographic data and characteristics vis-à-vis their self-tracking behavior. In-person semi-structured interviews were then conducted to ascertain the beliefs of the participants regarding the long-term use and value of personal quantified-self data.

The findings reveal the value that people place on self-tracking data, their thoughts on proper modes for accessing their archive once it moves from the private to the public space, and how to provide fidelity within the system such that their experiences are represented while also enabling meaning making on the part of subsequent users of the archive.

Today’s quantified-self data are generally embedded in systems that create a pipeline from the individual source to that of the corporate warehouse, bent on absorbing and extracting insight from a totality of big data. This article posits that new opportunities for knowing and for design can be revealed when a public interest rationale is appended to rich personalized collections of small data.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage librarians to teach digital archiving practices to journalists as a way of giving journalists the skills they need to save their work for future use and to facilitate the preservation of journalism for posterity.

The author has reviewed the personal digital archiving literature and analyzed how it might be specifically tailored to the unique needs of journalists.

Daily journalism has traditionally been preserved by libraries in the form of newspapers and magazines housed in library periodicals departments. Now that nearly all journalism is published online and libraries generally only have access via temporary subscriptions, libraries are prevented from doing any kind of traditional preservation work (e.g. storing copies locally). In the future, this lack of local preservation may lead to a shortage of early twenty-first century primary source material for historians.

The needs of journalists do vary greatly based on the nature and format of their work and its publication venue, making it difficult to offer a single set of standards or recommendations.

While personal digital archiving advocates have generally interpreted the word “personal” to be synonymous with “private,” this paper points to the need to expand the concept to include professional activities, particularly in light of the prevalence of telecommuting and freelance work arrangements, and the lack of support and training received by remote workers and independent contractors.

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of presentations and discussions held at the sixth Personal Digital Archiving Conference held at New York University, April 24-26, 2015.

A narrative approach is used to describe the event.

As individuals lead increasingly online lives and digital objects become correspondingly important to the archive, a whole host of issues from the technical to the ethical arises. Conference presentations ran the gamut, touching on all of these complicated areas and fleshing out the scope of the challenges that lie ahead for individuals grappling with their own data as well as archivists working to be responsible stewards of that data into the future.

This review touches on key practical, technical and ethical issues in the field of personal digital archiving, a new and increasingly important area for libraries and archives.

The conference explores current challenges and practices in personal digital archiving.

The purpose of this article is to outline a vision for digital stories of development, or online personal learning environments, which may eventually replace what we currently call “electronic portfolios” in education.

This is a conceptual article that provides a lifelong, life‐wide perspective on electronic portfolios based on the authors' research, focusing on some of the issues that need to be addressed to make this vision a reality.

Based on the concept of “lifetime personal web space,” this online archive of a life's collection of reflections, memories, digital artefacts and memorabilia, both personal and professional, has the potential to change the current paradigm of electronic portfolios, mostly institution‐bound, and focus instead on the individual or the family as the center for creating a digital archive, which can be used in a variety of contexts across the lifespan, from schools to universities to the workplace. Finally, this archive can be used to develop personal histories and reflective narratives to preserve our stories for future generations. A possible scenario is followed by the challenges faced when developing this service for widespread dissemination. This is not a formal research paper with analysis, discussion or results. The paper is meant to provide a vision or future direction for electronic portfolios that could be stored in the internet “cloud” for a lifetime and beyond.

This paper encourages individuals as well as institutions to explore new ways to construct electronic portfolios in the Internet “cloud” so that the owner of the portfolio has access across their lifespan. This paper could also be used by Web 2.0 developers to improve the development of tools, making them more useable and accessible across the lifespan, from early readers to the elderly.

This paper provides a future vision of the potential for cloud computing to be used as a lifetime store of memories and digital memorabilia, as well as a broader vision of the electronic portfolio process across the lifespan.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework to illustrate the archival knowledge applied by archivists in their personal archiving (PA) and the mechanism of the application of archival knowledge in their PA.

The grounded theory methodology was adopted. For data collection, in-depth interviews were conducted with 21 archivists in China. Data analysis was performed using the open coding, axial coding and selective coding to organise the archival knowledge composition of PA and develops the awareness-knowledge-action (AKA) integration model of archival knowledge application in the field of PA, according to the principles of the grounded theory.

The archival knowledge involved in the field of PA comprises four principal categories: documentation, arrangement, preservation and appraisal. Three interactive factors involved in archivists' archival knowledge application in the field of PA behaviour: awareness, knowledge and action, which form a pattern of awareness leading, knowledge guidance and action innovation, and archivists' PA practice is flexible and innovative. The paper underscored that it is need to improve archival literacy among general public.

The study constructs a theoretical framework to identify the specialised archival knowledge and skills of PA which is able to provide solutions for non-specialist PA and develops an AKA model to explain the interaction relationships between awareness, knowledge and action in the field of PA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine personal digital libraries (PDL) as a self-archiving approach, mainly based on individuals’ activities. Literature presents a wide range of perceptions of the term PDL. The rationale of using PDL and the capabilities that PDL should offer are also discussed. The key questions we focus on are: “What are the critical features of PDL?” and “Are there technologies that enable the implementation/incorporation of such capabilities in a low cost software product?”

We focus on “a user centred view of information process”, and examine how PDL could assist individuals to “create, seek, share and manage the life of information” (Foster et al., 2010). The capabilities that PDL should support, and the related technologies, are also discussed. Then, we describe experimentation with a prototype implemented to support/provide the mentioned capabilities. It is used to clarify our view for the creation of PDL. Finally, further discussion and conclusions are presented.

The technology is mature enough for building up PDLs with the specified features/capabilities.

A new perception of the term PDLs is presented. This perception tries to combine the self-archiving approach of information, based on a low-cost tool, and the user-centred approach to manage the “life of information”. This type of library is mainly used to cover personal needs. Users benefit from this type of PDL by personalised handling of information, reduced time to search and seek specific documents in their personal collections and less possibility for broken links or unavailable documents. We must also mention that new opportunities seem to appear for offering PDL as a service in the cloud.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the preservation practices of new media artists, in particular those working outside of the scope of major collecting institutions, examining how these artists preserve new media artworks in their custody.

The paper builds case studies of seven new media artists of differing practices and artistic approaches. For each case study, semi-structured interviews with the artists were conducted in conjunction with visits to the artists’ studios.

The study finds that new media artists face a number of shared preservation challenges and employ a range of preservation strategies, and that these challenges and strategies differ markedly from that of art museums and cultural heritage institutions.

This study considers preservation practices for new media artists generally. Further research into specific communities of artistic practice could profitably build upon this overall framework.

The findings of this research pose a number of implications for art museums and cultural heritage institutions, suggesting new ways these institutions might consider supporting the preservation of new media artworks before works enter into institutional custody.

The literature on new media art preservation emphasizes the importance of working with artists early in the life cycle of digital artworks. This study advances this by investigating preservation from the perspective of new media artists, deepening the understanding of challenges and potential preservation strategies for these artworks prior to entering or outside of institutional custody.