Digital Lives: research collections for the 21st Century

The recording, retention and storage, and transmission of cultural memory are changing. As people increasingly create and share information via digital media, personal and cultural memory is being transformed.

For centuries, individuals have used physical artifacts as personal memory devices and reference aids. Over time these have ranged from personal journals and correspondence, to photographs and photographic albums, to whole personal libraries of manuscripts, sound and video recordings, books, serials, clippings and off-prints. These personal collections and archives are often of immense importance to individuals, their descendents, and to research in a broad range of Arts and Humanities subjects including literary criticism, history, and history of science.

Personal collections of scholarly interest to the Arts and Humanities tend to focus either on:

particularly influential and eminent individuals for example the papers and correspondence of famous scientists or literary authors or;

groups of individuals collated by organisations and projects for example the diaries in the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University or the 6,000 oral history interviews in the Millennium Memory Bank now held in the British Library.

These personal collections support histories of cultural practice by documenting creative processes, writing, reading, communication, social networks, and the production and dissemination of knowledge. They provide scholars with more nuanced contexts for understanding wider scientific and cultural developments.

As we move from cultural 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.

Despite the likely importance of personal digital collections and archives to future study of the cultural record, relatively little research has been undertaken by cultural institutions or library, archive and information researchers in to how existing curatorial practice and approaches to such collections may need to be adapted for a digital age. Similarly the potential contribution and transferable lessons from other disparate fields that may provide tools for such materials are virtually unexplored. Major future research collections and areas of potential research are at risk if these issues are not addressed.

The Digital Lives project is designed to provide a major pathfinding study of personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories such as the British Library. It brings together expert curators and practioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary collections, web-archiving, history of science, and oral history from within the British Library with researchers in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, and Information Technology and Law at the University of Bristol. It aims to provide a broad foundation of linked research and curatorial studies; and finally to share experience and help to build a community of repositories and researchers working in this rapidly emerging and important field.

These materials also form a substantial part of the collections of other national and regional libraries and archives which are widely used by academic staff and students. We therefore expect outcomes from our research to be of significant interest within the Arts and Humanities and the libraries, archives, and information sector. It will also be of potential interest to researchers exploring applications of digital memory in other areas such as health and aging populations and for individuals who wish to manage their own digital collections for family history or other purposes.