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Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage Ed. Donald T. Hawkins. Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2013. 320 p. $49.50 softcover (ISBN 978-1-57387-480-9).
In the very first paragraph of chapter 1, Jeff Ubois of the MacArthur Foundation presents for us the overlying objective of this book, a genuine compendium of approaches to understanding and dealing with our digital selves: "By helping to build a common understanding of personal archives, this book supports collaboration between diverse types of institutions and individuals working in different disciplines" (1). This is key, because it seems to me that many of us have been looking at the problems associated with organizing and maintaining long-term access to all that we create and record and share, and that we are still trying to define what the "personal digital archives" is. But for the sake of so many-ourselves as individuals, our families and future generations, the research community, and the collective memory of what builds every nation-the need to protect the digital legacy is an imperative, starting now, and starting with this book.
I say this, after carefully reading through thirteen essays crafted bv sixteen experts in this new area of research, because I feel as if I finished with a good sense of current personal digital archiving issues, and with a desire to become part of the solution. The editor does a nice job of keeping the essays at a level that is mostly comprehensible to a broader audience (notably free of a lot of jargon, I might add). We are only beginning to grasp the complexity and challenges on many fronts, including bringing together and organizing all that stuff stored in disparate locations (held, for example, on the PC [including email and commercially downloaded content such as music and books] and on our various devices, online, with third parties, and on social media platforms); understanding the legal ramifications of digital inheritance, privacy, and copyrights; figuring...