Personal Digital Archiving: Issues for Libraries and a Summary of the PDA Conference

Abstract

Libraries pride themselves on their Special Collections – the unique sets of photographs, correspondence, diaries, home movies, and other documents that reside in only one library. Most Special Collection material comes from individuals or organizations, and today almost all of this material is born-digital. But there are not (as yet) well-established methods for ingesting and managing this type of material. This paper explores the emerging field of Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) which seeks to explore methods for organizing and managing born-digital personal collections of photos, email, calendars, diaries, and other documents. The paper reports back from the Spring 2015 PDA Conference on topics and tools likely to be of interest to Special Collections Librarians.