[Air-L] CFP: Personal Digital Archiving 2011

[Smiljana Antonijevic]

Call for Participation

Personal Digital Archiving 2011
February 24 & 25, 2011
The Internet Archive, San Francisco
http://personalarchiving.com


We are pleased to announce that the Personal Digital Archiving 2011
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.

Conference sessions will be selected by an international peer review panel
that includes:

Ben Gross, Highlands 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 John, The British Library

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 presentations will be 15-20 minutes in length. If you wish to
submit an abstract for the conference, please email
topics at personalarchiving.com with:

* title of your project, paper or presentation
* a 150-300 word abstract
* a brief biography (a few sentences)

Deadline for abstracts: 24 December, 2010.
Notification of acceptance: 5 January, 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. But what are the long-term prospects for
this data?

The combination of new capture devices (more than 1 billion camera phones
will be sold in 2010) 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professional data, and published and unpublished information.

For individuals, institutions, investors, entrepreneurs, and funding
agencies thinking about how best to address these issues, Personal Digital
Archiving 2011 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?
       • What is the relationship of personal health information and
quantified self data 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 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?
       • Can we better anticipate (and measure) losses of personal material?
       • What are the options for cultural heritage institutions that want
to preserve the personal collections of citizens and scholars, creators and
actors?
       • 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, lifestreams, 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

In February, 2010, more than 60 people met at the Internet Archive to
explore common concerns about personal digital archiving. Attendees included
representatives from UC Berkeley, Stanford, UNC, UT Austin, the University
of Illinois, and Oxford University; Microsoft, Yahoo (Labs, and Flickr),
Google, and Amazon (S3); the Smithsonian, the Magnes Museum; Xerox PARC; the
Center for Home Movies, the California Digital Library, Family Search, and
the Coalition for Networked Information. Support was provided by the
Internet Archive, the Bassetti Foundation, and the Netherlands Institute for
Sound and Vision.

Videos of the 2010 conference sessions are up at
http://www.personalarchiving.com/conference2010/, and detailed notes on the
conference are at http://www.personalarchiving.com/2010/02/conference-notes/
.

Several projects discussed in 2010 have progressed, and we'll have some
reports on these:

- a showcase of interface designs for personal collections
- cost modeling for personal archives
- guidelines for AV archives interested in preserving amateur film
- small scale endowments for storage that can allow individuals to preserve
their materials inside leading institutions

The conference fee is $95 for attendees from non-commercial institutions and
$195 for attendees from commercial organizations. Scholarships and early
bird discounts are available.

Registration and other conference information is available at
http://personalarchiving.com.