Queens Memory thumb drives await future donors.

At Queens Memory, and our BPL partner project Our Streets, Our Stories, we send participants home from our community scanning events with thumb drives containing JPEG files of the materials they brought in to be digitized. Over the course of three events, we have encountered participants with hugely varying levels of digital literacy: one donor didn’t know what a thumb drive was and had only the most basic knowledge of computers, another was a professional digital photographer. What quickly became clear is that Culture in Transit can’t just provide people with digital files and call it a day; we also need to be educating participants about how to care for these digital surrogates, as well as any born digital materials they may have in their personal collections.

To meet this need, I created a pamphlet on personal digital archiving called “Preserving Your Digital Memories” that is distributed to Queens Memory participants as a companion to the thumb drive they are taking home. The pamphlet discusses why digital files require special care, provides a step-by-step guide to maintaining your personal digital archive, and provides tips for digitizing your own photographs or documents. It also showcases some great images from the Queens Memory collection, and links the historical mission of the project with digital literacy skills.

The content of the pamphlet is drawn largely from the Do It Yourself Personal Digital Archiving workshop that I conducted with Yvonne Ng and Marie Lascu at the Personal Digital Archiving Conference this past spring. Our workshop included an in-depth review of the principles and processes of personal digital archiving, and breakout sessions on video, audio, photos and documents. The challenge was to condense a packed three hour workshop into an accessible, six page pamphlet!

The bulk of the information in the pamphlet is condensed into these two pages. In the clearest possible language, the guide goes through the main steps in maintaining a personal digital archive. The final step, “Long-term Preservation,” is included because this question came up repeatedly during the DIY PDA workshop, and because we want to empower our participants to reach out to the memory institutions in their communities. Overall, the pamphlet attempts to balance accessibility with robust information and professional standards. The pamphlet aims to give our participants the skills necessary to maintain the digital surrogates we create at the community scanning events, and to preserve their born digital collections for the future.

You can download a PDF of the pamphlet here and on the Project Documentation page of this website.