Personal Digital Archiving Day Event to Provide Tips on Preserving Your “Stuff”

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Once upon a time, it was fairly easy to manage your old photos, correspondence, and even home movies, which, for the most part, were locked into one format, and could only be shared in the physical sense. The technological advances of the digital era have changed all of that, making a variety of media easily shared across multiple platforms but also posing challenges in terms of reliable long-term storage. Continuous updates in formats have also rendered much of the stored data from our past—from floppy disks, older hard drives, and defunct software programs—all but obsolete and seemingly inaccessible forever.

To provide expert guidance to people on how best to preserve various types of media—from old home movies and historic photographs to sound recordings and tweets— the UC San Diego Libraries will be holding a “Personal Digital Archiving Day” workshop on April 25.  At the event, which will take place from 12 noon to 4 p.m. in the Seuss Room of the Geisel Library, preservation specialists from the Library will be on hand to provide expert advice on how best to store, manage, and transfer personal data in various formats. Interested individuals are welcome to bring materials with them for a one-on-one consultation. The workshop is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Topics to be addressed at the workshop include best practices for: 

• Archiving digital photography and working with metadata
• Storing family photographs and historic documents
• Preserving e-mail correspondence
• Exporting and preserving audio recordings
• Preserving film and digital video
• Preserving paper and digital records
• Preserving personal Web sites, blogs, and social media

The workshop coincides with the American Library Association’s Preservation Week (April 22-28), which is held annually to raise awareness of the need to preserve personal, family, and community collections of all kind, as well as library, museum, and archive collections. For more information about Preservation Week:  http://www.ala.org/alcts/confevents/preswk

About the UC San Diego Libraries

Ranked among the nation’s top 20 public academic research libraries, the UC San Diego Libraries play an integral role in advancing and supporting the university’s research, teaching, and public service missions. As the intellectual heart of the UC San Diego campus, the university libraries provide access to more than 7 million digital and print volumes, journals, and multimedia materials to meet the knowledge and information needs of faculty, students, and members of the public.  Each day, the Libraries vast resources are accessed nearly 90,000 times through the Libraries’ main Web site. For more information: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/