Getting Personal: Confronting the Challenges of Archiving Personal Records in the Digital Age
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GETTING PERSONAL: CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGES OF ARCHIVING PERSONAL RECORDS IN THE DIGITAL AGE by Jordan Leslie Bass A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of the University of Manitoba in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History (Archival Studies) Joint Masters Program University of Manitoba/University of Winnipeg Winnipeg, Manitoba Jordan Leslie Bass Copyright © 2012 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract.............................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………...v List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………...vi List of Copyrighted Material…………………………………………………………..vii Introduction: The Value and Precarious Existence of Personal Digital Archives………1 Chapter One: Archival Responses to Personal Records……………………………….11 Chapter Two: Personalized Digital Archiving Environments…………………………47 Chapter Three: Recent Innovations and Research in Archiving Personal Digital Records…………………………………………………………………………….……83 Conclusion: Revisiting the Pre-Custodial Interventionist Ideal………………………128 Appendix A: Pre-Custodial Workflow – Phase One…………………………………138 Appendix B: Pre-Custodial Workflow – Phase Two…………………………………139 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….140 iii ABSTRACT Personal digital records are one of the most underrepresented areas of archival theory and practice. Documentary forms created by private persons have long been victim of a poverty of professional attention, and much of the literature on the appraisal and preservation of records has tended to focus on those generated by government and other organizational entities. And strategies developed for the archival management of digital records have similarly placed strong emphasis on business functions or corporate transactions as the primary unit of analysis. This scholastic deficit has severely impaired the ability of the archivist to comprehend and effectively meet the many challenges of archiving personal records in the digital age. This thesis demonstrates how investigations of the original context of creation and use of records in contemporary personal computing environments are integral to the development of comprehensive strategies for the capture and preservation of personal digital archives. It is within these digital domains that archivists come to see cultures of personal recordkeeping, private appraisal decisions based on unique designations of value, and the complexities of both online and offline personal digital preservation strategies. A keen understanding of how individuals create and preserve their digital records across time and space should be of the utmost importance to archivists for, if nothing else, these pre-custodial activities are the principal sites of archival provenance. Chapter one discusses past and present responses to both paper-based and electronic personal archives. The discussion begins with the definition of the personal record as essentially non-archival by early leading archival theorists and how these definitions, though first advanced in the early to mid-twentieth century, continue to find iv resonance in contemporary archival ideas and institutional mandates. This chapter then illustrates how ideas predicated on the management of electronic government records, and metadata standards developed for formalized electronic recordkeeping systems, are not easily transposed to personal domains. Chapter two takes a critical look at the often oversimplified personal digital archiving environment to expose the many nuances in the context of creation and use of records by individuals in the digital era. Chapter three explores a number of emerging approaches to the professional archiving of personal digital records and reveals how the proper management of these materials requires multiple hardware and software applications, concise acquisition strategies and preservation methodologies, and diligent front-end work to ensure personal digital records cross the threshold of archival repositories. The thesis concludes with a summary of the main arguments and collates the best ideas, approaches, and technologies reviewed throughout to propose a hypothetical strategy for archiving personal digital records in the present. This thesis argues that significantly more work with records creators earlier in the record creation process must be done when archiving personal digital records because more proactive measures are required to capture and preserve these materials than was previously the case with paper-based or analog documentary forms. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to acknowledge and thank Professors Tom Nesmith and Terry Cook. Their passion for archives has been a true inspiration throughout my coursework, internship, conference presentations, and the writing of this thesis. A special thank you to Tom Nesmith, my thesis advisor, for first introducing me to personal archives and for encouraging me to research and write a thesis on this important topic. I would also like to thank my fellow students from the University of Manitoba Archival Studies Program, the Social Archives Section at Library and Archives Canada, my fellow archivist interns, and now colleagues, from the ‘LAC summer of 2009,’ as well as my friends and colleagues at the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections and the Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library. To my family for their love and support, I am eternally grateful. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Siobhan Cheekie, for her love, patience, and unfailing support. I could not have written nor successfully defended this thesis without you. vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1.a DCMI Element Set………………………………………………………... 37 Figure 1.1.b DCMI Application Profile……………………………………………....... 37 Figure 1.2 InterPARES Creator Guidelines: Identity and Integrity Metadata Requirements………………………………………………………………………….. 41 Figure 2.1 Temporal and Spatial Disparity in Personal Records Mediation………….. 51 Figure 2.2 Value Folksonomy for Personal Archives…………………………………. 69 Figure 2.3 Personal Digital Preservation Environments………………………………. 77 Figure 3.1 The Duke Data Accessioner User Interface……………………………….. 88 Figure 3.2 CCSDS - OAIS Functional Entities……………………………………….. 96 Figure 3.3 Archivematica 0.7.1 – alpha………………………………………………. 115 Figure 3.4 Home and Office Painless Persistent Long-Term Archiving (HOPPLA) 2.1 User Interface…………………………………………………………………….. 123 vii List of Copyrighted Material for which Permission was Obtained Permission Obtained from Seth Shaw, Electronic Records Archivist, University Archives, Duke University Libraries for: Figure 3.1 – Duke Data Accessioner User Interface. “Screen capture.” http://library.duke.edu/uarchives/about/tools/data-accessioner Permission Obtained from Petar Petrov, Information and Software Engineering Group, Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology for: Figure 3.4 – Home and Office Painless Persistent Long-Term Archiving (HOPPLA) 2.1 User Interface. “Screen capture.” http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/hoppla/ 1 INTRODUCTION THE VALUE AND PRECARIOUS EXISTENCE OF PERSONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVES Today, the will to archive is a powerful impulse in contemporary culture…Today the new information technologies expand our capacity to record everything: to be is to record and record in volume means to classify, index and archive.1 People are capturing and storing an ever-increasing amount of digital information about or for themselves, including emails, documents, articles, portfolios of work, digital images, and audio and video recordings. Computer processing, storage, and software tools available to individuals are increasing in power, volume, and ease of use, year on year. Many issues arise from this more informal and increasingly empowered landscape of personal collection,…which will have major future impacts.2 Personal archives contain the documentation of individual and collective human experience as witnessed by those who memorialize the activities and events occurring throughout their lives. Though the majority of people may not refer to their collections of letters, diaries, videos, email messages, and photos as archives, these documentary forms are generated by the organic rhythms of everyday life and preserved because of their enduring value which, by many definitions of the word, indeed makes them archival.3 For individuals, records within their archives serve as a testament to creativity and achievement, are involved in a continued construction and expression of identity, document personal and professional relationships, and facilitate re-encounters with the 1 Mike Featherstone, “Archive,” Theory, Culture and Society, 23 (2006), p. 595. 2 Neil Beagrie, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections,” D-Lib Magazine, 11:6 (June 2005). Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june05/beagrie/06beagrie.html (accessed 21 November 2010). 3 A standard definition of archives is “Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator…” See Richard Pearce-Moses, Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, Society of American Archivists, (2005). Available at http://www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details.asp?DefinitionKey=156 (accessed 25 October 2011).