Showing posts with label library. Show all posts
Showing posts with label library. Show all posts

24.4.18

Review: Personal Archiving

Personal archiving : preserving our digital heritagePersonal archiving : preserving our digital heritage by Donald T. Hawkins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have worked most of my career on enterprise content management, a way for organizations to keep track of the many kinds of content that they create and use. This involves a variety of areas of focus, including long term archiving, records management, management of special types of files like CAD drawings or digital assets like audio and video files, searching, viewing, conversions, and more. I find the concept of personal digital archiving a close cousin to what I’ve been doing for years, and this was my first chance to read about the concept from the academic/library side.

The book consists of 13 chapters, or short papers on varying subjects regarding personal digital archiving by different authors. As expected in a book such as this, there was no flow between chapters, this was more a collection, written with different voices. Many of the papers repeated the same basic tenets of digital archiving, and I found there is plenty of overlap with commercial solutions for enterprises. Where the enterprise solutions fail is not in the software engines that maintain the records but in the simple interfaces and, often, in the way the software works, or doesn’t, in a cloud environment. And in the cost – tools for corporate use are priced for corporate use. I found this very interesting, but didn’t run across anything I hadn’t been exposed to in the corporate world, which really wasn’t discussed in this book. I was surprised to not see any mentions of e-discovery software, which offers many of the functional features only starting to be considered with the tools discussed here. These e-discovery tools (and extensive user experience with them) existed when the book was written, as have corporate-aimed tools using faceted search, personal taxonomies, and tagging, leading me to believe this lack of coverage reflects siloed thinking in the personal archiving community. I hope this has changed.

There were pointers here for additional study, including the Library of Congress’ website. There were also discussions of specific software solutions from academics, but in perusing these websites, I didn’t find usable software. As can be expected in a 5 year old book on technology, much of the technology content regarding solutions is dated and not useful. I see there’s a newer book with a similar title by the ALA, that might be a good alternative to this. It’s on my to read list. This is an important topic, and this contains a serviceable introduction to the issues.


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