Personal preservation is “...preserving any digital collection that falls outside the purview of large cultural institutions.”
--Ashenfelder, M. (2015, August 3). The Personal Digital Archiving 2015 Conference [Web log post]. The Signal. Library of Congress. Retrieved from https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2015/08/report-on-the-personal-digital-archiving-2015-conference/
In this case, personal preservation also refers to professional research data and documents that are not at a University-level but that are still relevant to faculty work. The strategies provided here apply to University resources, but may also apply to your own personal/home files.
1. Local: your local machine
2. External: an external drive
3. Cloud: VT Google Drive
Courtesy of XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/1683/
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
"Saving" doesn't mean you can open it in the future |
Time-consuming process to appraise, organize, migrate files, and set up storage and syncing |
Technologies can fail or become obsolete |
Requires long-term maintenance and staying up-to-date on basic preservation standards |
You may want to access or modify data after it has been submitted to VTechWorks, VTechData, or another institution | Requires storage space |
Helps in preparing content transfer to University-level preservation environments |
File formats evolve or become obsolete, and new formats are developed. Ideally you want a non-proprietary, lossless file format. Current best practices for file formats include but are not limited to:
Text | Portable Document Format (PDF/A) |
Plaintext | Plaintext (TXT) |
Image | Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) |
Audio | Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE) |
Video | Matroska Multimedia Container (MKV) |
Multi-namespace message box (MBOX) | |
Website | WebARChive file format (WARC) |