Archiving for Everyone in Four Easy Steps
By Angelique Slater
Anyone can archive their family information in a way that will last a very long time. Personal archiving has become a popular way to preserve family history. Often, it is not easy to decide what should be saved and what should not. The Library of Congress has come up with four steps for a person to follow to archive their documents. The following are the steps offered by the Library of Congress:
1. Identify what you want to save
2. Decide what is most important to you
3. Organize the content
There are some people that think that self archiving is not needed because most of our lives are online, so it will be preserved somewhere. That is not actually true. Yes, some data might be saved somewhere but all of your information might not be saved, so it is be better to archive your information yourself instead of relying on another way. Creating a storage place for your data can be difficult but thinking that offsite storage is the best place is not necessarily the way to go. A home desk top computer with a separate hard drive for archival storage is one of the better options for a home archivist[ii]. That way all of the digital media you have made and collected are in one spot, not multiple locations and you can find what you are looking for.
[i] Library of Congress Why Digital Preservation is Important to You (June 2010) http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/videos/personal_archiving/personal-archiving_transcript.pdf
[ii] Marshall, Catherine. Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving Part 2(March/April 2008) D-Lib Magazine Vol.14 No. 3-4 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/marshall/03marshall-pt2.html
I remember when I was writing my thesis for my undergraduate degree (a year-long project, mind you), I was so paranoid about losing it I made back-ups of it everywhere I could think of. I saved it to my hard drive, my dad's hard drive, my flash drive, I emailed a copy to myself, I emailed a copy to my professor, and I uploaded it to Oakland University's version of Black Board (we used Moodle). I could not relax until I knew I had that paper saved in as many locations as possible, just in case something happened to one form of my back ups! I was horrified when I heard that one of the girl's flash drive deleted her thesis, and she hadn't emailed it to herself. Luckily she had an older version still saved that she just had to rework, but I couldn't believe that she didn't back up something so important in multiple locations, just in case something didn't work right!
ReplyDeleteAshlee Kazirut