Registration and the call for submission is now open for the 2012 edition of this important conference.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
—————————-
*Personal Digital Archiving 2012*
*February 23-24, 2012*
The Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave
San Francisco, CA
The Personal Digital Archiving 2012 Conference is now open for
participation! We welcome proposals for session topics and speakers, as
well as volunteers to help us organize and serve on site.
Relevant themes include but are not limited to family photographs and
home movies; personal health and financial data; interface design for
archives; scrap booking; social network data; institutional practices;
genealogy; email, blogs and other correspondence; and funding models.
Conference sessions will be selected by an international peer review
panel that includes:
* Ben Gross, Linde Group
* Brewster Kahle, The Internet Archive
* Cal Lee, University of North Carolina
* Cathy Marshall, Microsoft Research
* Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information
* Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo! Research
* Jeff Ubois, The Bassetti Foundation
* Jeremy Leighton John, The British Library
* Judith Zissman, Consultant
* Lori Kendall, University of Illinois
* Peter Brantley, Internet Archive
* Stan James, independent consultant
* Steve Griffin, Library of Congress
Standard conference panels will be one hour, and presentations will be
15-20 minutes in length. To submit a proposal for a panel, presentation,
or poster, please *register online* at
https://www.conftool.pro/personalarchiving2012/register.php.
Please include an abstract of what you plan to discuss, and a brief
biography suitable for posting on the conference web site.
The conference will also hold a series of 5 minute lighting talks on
Friday afternoon. These will be organized on a first-come, first served
basis during the conference.
Deadline for abstracts: 30 November, 2011.
Notification of acceptance: 30 December, 2011.
Late submissions will be considered on an individual basis.
–
*Topics for discussion*
From family photographs and personal papers to health and financial
information, vital personal records are becoming digital. Creation and
capture of digital information has become a part of the daily routine
for hundreds of millions of people, and there is a growing number of
commercial services, such as Facebook’s Timeline, aimed at individuals
who want to preserve a record of their life.
The combination of new capture devices (more than 1 billion camera
phones will be sold in 2012) and new types of media are reshaping both
our personal and collective memories. Personal collections are growing
in size and complexity. As these collections spread across different
media (including film and paper!), we are redrawing the lines between
personal and professional data, and between published and unpublished
information.
But what are the long-term prospects for this data? Which institutions,
technologies, standards, funding models, and services are most credible?
For individuals, institutions, investors, entrepreneurs, and funding
agencies thinking about how best to address these issues, Personal
Digital Archiving 2012 will clarify the technical, social, economic
questions around personal archiving. Presentations will include
contemporary solutions to archiving problems that attendees may
replicate for their own collections, and address questions such as:
* What new social norms around preservation, access, and disclosure are
emerging?
* Do libraries, museums, and archives have a new responsibility to
collect digital personal materials?
* How can we effectively preserve social network data? Can we better
anticipate (and measure) losses of personal material?
* What is the relationship of personal health information to personal
archives?
* How can we cope with the intersection between personal data and
collective or social data that is personal?
* How can we manage the shift from simple text-based data to rich media
such as movies in personal collections?
* What tools and services are needed to better enable self-archiving?
What models for user interfaces are most appropriate?
* What are viable existing economic models that can support personal
archives? What new economic models should we evaluate?
* What are the long-term rights management issues? Are there
unrecognized stakeholders we should begin to account for now?
* What are the projects we can commit to in the coming year?
Whether the answers to these questions are framed in terms of personal
archiving, personal digital heritage, preserving digital lives,
scrapbooking, or managing intellectual estates, they present major
challenges for both individuals and institutions: data loss is a nearly
universal experience, whether it is due to hardware failure,
obsolescence, user error, lack of institutional support, or any one of
many other reasons. Some of these losses may not matter; but the early
work of the Nobel prize winners of the 2030s is likely to be digital
today, and therefore at risk in ways that previous scientific and
literary creations were not. And it isn’t just Nobel winners that
matter: the lives of all of us will be preserved in ways not previously
possible.
*Background, registration, and fees*
For those who register before December 25, the conference fee is $125
for attendees from non-commercial institutions; $195 for attendees from
other organizations; students may register early for $100. Scholarships
are also available.
Videos and detailed notes about the 2010 and 2011 conference sessions
are available on http://personalarchiving.com and at
http://www.archive.org/details/personalarchiveconf.