The Long Term Fate of Our Digital Belongings: Toward a Service Model for Personal Archives
Catherine C. Marshall, Sara Bly, and Francoise Brun-Cottan

TL;DR
This study explores the challenges and current practices in personal digital archiving, highlighting the need for improved long-term storage solutions due to increasing digital belongings and associated risks.
Contribution
It provides empirical insights into personal archiving behaviors, identifies key challenges, and proposes the design considerations for a service model for long-term digital preservation.
Findings
Home users create and lose irreplaceable digital artifacts.
Users struggle with evaluating material worth and managing distributed storage.
Current practices are inconsistent and insufficient for long-term preservation.
Abstract
We conducted a preliminary field study to understand the current state of personal digital archiving in practice. Our aim is to design a service for the long-term storage, preservation, and access of digital belongings by examining how personal archiving needs intersect with existing and emerging archiving technologies, best practices, and policies. Our findings not only confirmed that experienced home computer users are creating, receiving, and finding an increasing number of digital belongings, but also that they have already lost irreplaceable digital artifacts such as photos, creative efforts, and records. Although participants reported strategies such as backup and file replication for digital safekeeping, they were seldom able to implement them consistently. Four central archiving themes emerged from the data: (1) people find it difficult to evaluate the worth of accumulated…
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Taxonomy
TopicsTechnology Use by Older Adults · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection · Personal Information Management and User Behavior
