Personal Archiving

Trying to find something useful to do at work while I waited for some images to load, I decided it would be a good idea to clean out my Inbox. In doing so, I can across a great website that Dr. MacCall sent out about doing a little personal archiving. Still waiting for my images to load, I looked over the sight for a few minutes and decided that its contents totally deserved their own blog! The site combines two information topics I love, metadata and archives!

The site explains that so much of our lives are saved in digital format that everyone should take the time to make sure they do not lose this valuable information. Think about it for a minute. In the past, people were able to save their physical letters and photos to tell the story of their lives. What will be saved from our own lives if we delete our emails or our computer crashes.
The website offers great tips on how to protect your digital memories. For photos, it suggests making a CD of the pictures, uploading them to a site like Flickr, and printing out the ones that are very special. For emails, the site suggests saving important emails to your computer's hard drive and putting a copy on a CD. The biggest issue facing most digital materials is their hardware or software becoming obsolete, so its very important that with each new system upgrade, that your digital files are upgrade too.

After reading this article, I decided that I needed to make a little personal archive for myself. You never know who will become famous. I had already made metadata for my photo collection, but now I am going to start saving emails and other digital records of my life for the future.
I really think this website brings to life the importance of both archives and metadata for the average person because everyone has a history worth saving and sharing. I hope that everyone in the future will catch the archiving bug and make their own memories last forever. (Like mine will!)

Sweet, Sweet Metadata

Since I am the Metadata Maven, I thought that I should address this subject in some way. I recently took a metadata class at the University of Alabama with Dr. MacCall (great teacher). I really enjoyed the class in which I learned more about Web 2.0 than I could have ever hoped to learn on my own. Although the class was taught in a more "this is the future of metadata and not the creation of metadata itself" I still became fascinated with the topic. I work in a archive at the University and I spend all day looking at metadata as I scan documents into their database. I really would like to explore this topic in some type of job where I would be able to interact with both people and metadata.

The field of metadata is developing before our eyes. Its not like cataloging, where the rules have been set down and everybody follows them. When dealing with metadata, everyone has their own way of doing things. Standards are developing, but they are by no means suitable for every user. Its going to take several years before we even begin to really get into figuring out how to deal with metadata and how to make its creation efficient for more people.