Website of the Week

Personal Archiving: Preserving Your Digital Memories http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/index.html

As technology advances, an ever increasing number of items important to us are in digital form. Many of us will want to copy analog items such as photographs, phonographic records, and important papers into digital form to preserve them for the future. Many of our digital objects require special handling and management to keep them from becoming obsolete. For example I have software I wrote over the last nearly 30 years that were stored on paper, paper tape, magnetic tape, 8" floppies, 5-1/4" floppies, 3.5" floppies, CD-Rs, DVDs, and the "cloud". Many of those items I can no longer access because the media they are on has become obsolete. 50 years from now all of the digital media we are using today will probably be obsolete. How do we avoid losing that which is important to us? This website presented by the Library of Congress has some practical ideas on how to become personal archivists and preserve our history.

Review by John Stanton, SWC Librarian