About Digital Lives

Introduction

The nature of the creation, transmission and retention of personal and cultural information is changing fundamentally. As people increasingly produce, acquire, share and hold information by means of digital media, communal and collective history, family memory and private reminiscence are being transformed.

For centuries, and indeed millennia, individuals have used physical artifacts as personal memory devices and reference aids. In the 20th century, these typically ranged from personal journals and correspondence, through photographic albums, sound recordings and cine films, to personal compilations of books, serials, clippings, offprints and observational data. These personal archives and collections are often of profound importance to individuals and to their descendents, and of immense value to research in a broad range of arts and humanities such as literary criticism and history as well as in the social, human and natural sciences.

Personal collections of scholarly interest tend to focus either on:

• particularly influential and eminent individuals (for example the correspondence and other papers of literary authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle or of celebrated scientists such as Alexander Fleming); or
• large numbers of individuals systematically approached by researchers (for example the diaries collated in the Mass Observation Archive, and the 6,000 oral history interviews in the Millennium Memory Bank).

These personal collections support histories of literary, scientific, political and socioeconomic practice by documenting creative processes, shared historic events, individual activities, personal thinking and sentiment, and social and professional networks, not least in the production and dissemination of knowledge and understanding. Thus an individual’s informal reading, bibliographic records, draft compositions, letter and journal writing, note taking, travel photographs and sketches, appointment diaries, financial receipts, bank statements and airline tickets, as manifested in personal archives, provide scholars with nuanced contexts for understanding wider scientific and cultural developments.

As we move from a memory based on physical artifacts, to a hybrid digital and physical environment, and then increasingly shift towards new forms of digital memory, many fundamental new issues arise for research institutions such as the British Library that will be the custodians of and provide research access to digital archives and personal collections created by individuals in the 21st century.

The Digital Lives Project

Digital Lives is a major research project focussing on personal digital archives and their relationship with research repositories. It brings together expert curators and practitioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary collections, web archiving, history of science, and oral history from within the British Library (one of the world’s leading research libraries) with researchers in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, and the Centre for Information Technology and Law at the University of Bristol.

We expect that the findings of the project will be applicable to a wide range of individuals and research repositories. Personal archives form a substantial and essential part of the collections of national and regional libraries and archives that are widely used by academic faculty and students and diverse independent researchers.

The project is considering not only how archives currently being deposited are changing but also the fate of the research collections of the future being created now and implications for collection development and practice.

We are addressing these aims by focussing on the following activities:

• establishing how modern personal digital collections are being created, managed, and made accessible (or likely will be in the immediate future)
• exploring the needs and views of scholarly users of future personal digital collections such as biographers and historians
• identifying and discussing with potential donors and curators the implications and methods of transfer of personal digital collections from individuals to longterm repositories
• researching and assessing transferable tools such as computer forensics or data synchronisation which could assist with capture, management, description, and preservation of personal digital collections or facilitate access to them
• establishing the impacts of legislation, confidentiality and professional ethics on personal digital collections, and implications acquisition by repositories and their dissemination
• recognising the hybrid nature of most personal collections for the foreseeable future, these comprising both digital and analogue (conventional) media
• investigating new services which are increasingly acting as intermediaries for managing and publishing personal digital collections and assessing their potential effectiveness for preservation
• sharing our experience and outcomes from this research with others, and helping to build a community of repositories and researchers working in this area, and
• collaborating with members of this community, and thereby beginning the process of agreeing and unifying approaches to selection, description, preservation and access for personal digital collections

Our overall aim is to make a substantial impact in this emerging field of research, and to provide a foundation for future larger scale research projects.

Further information on our methodology and work packages can be found in our Research Proposal (Case for Support) (pdf format, 166KB).

Project Board

The project is directed by a project board of senior staff consisting of Professor David Nicholas and Ian Rowlands (University College London), and Katrina Dean, Kristian Jensen and Jeremy Leighton John (British Library).

The principal investigator Dr Jeremy Leighton John is responsible for the overall management and direction of the project, and the strategy for publication and dissemination, and is first point of contact for all exchanges with the AHRC. The coinvestigators Dr Katrina Dean and Dr Ian Rowlands coordinate and supervise respectively the curatorial work and investigative survey.

(Until leaving the British Library, Neil Beagrie was principal investigator and member of the project board from 3 September 2007 to 7 December 2007.)

External Project Advisory Board

An external board provides input to the development and dissemination of the project; and its members act as external advocates of its work. Members are:

Sheila Anderson (Arts and Humanities Data Service)
Professor Dame Wendy Hall (Southampton University)
Christian Lindholm (Fjord)
Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information)
David Thomas (The National Archives)
Susan Thomas (Oxford University Library)
Professor Jonathan Zittrain (Oxford University and Harvard University)