Will Your Work Survive the Digital Age?

I am surprised when we travel to some of the conferences we do that novices are often all excited about digitizing their family history: scanning in pictures, letters, documents, indexing and typing everything into their computer. As a librarian and an archivist, it makes me nervous. Heaven forbid someone would think they don't really need the originals anymore.
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When you have digitized something, you have:

• Made it easier to share
• Made it easier to disseminate
• Made it easier to copy
• Made it easier to restore
• Made it easier to index

You have not:

• Archived it.
• Probably made it last for more than a couple of years.

Threats to digital data enclude:

• Hard to retrieve—buried with useless information
• Physical deterioration
• Lapsed, Purposely Destroyed
• Un-useable format, Digital Obsolescene

The solutions I propose in my "Will Your Work Survive the Digital Age?" Lecture are these:

• Dissemination: Store many copies in many situations and places
• Refreshing/Back Up: Make a new copy in the same format to avoid physical deterioration
• Replication: Making many copies of the material in different format
• Migration: Move to the new system, newest software, newest format
• Naming, Tagging and Filing: Use descriptive keywords and keep files organized.

We'll discuss each of these shortly. More to come...