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Internet-based personal digital belongings present different vulnerabilities than locally stored materials. We use responses to a survey of people who have recovered lost websites, in combination with supplementary interviews, to paint a fuller picture of current curatorial strategies and practices. We examine the types of personal, topical, and commercial websites that respondents have lost and the reasons they have lost this potentially valuable material. We further explore what they have tried to recover and how the loss influences their subsequent practices. We found that curation of personal digital materials in online stores bears some striking similarities to the curation of similar materials stored locally in that study participants continue to archive personal assets by relying on a combination of benign neglect, sporadic backups, and unsystematic file replication. However, we have also identified issues specific to Internet-based material: how risk is spread by distributing the files among multiple servers and services; the circular reasoning participants use when they discuss the safety of their digital assets; and the types of online material that are particularly vulnerable to loss. The study reveals ways in which expectations of permanence and notification are violated and situations in which benign neglect has far greater consequences for the long-term fate of important digital assets., Comment: 6 pages, 2 tables, to be published in the Proceedings of IS&T Archiving 2007, May 21-24 2007, Arlington, Virginia, USA

We conducted a preliminary field study to understand the current state of personal digital archiving in practice. Our aim is to design a service for the long-term storage, preservation, and access of digital belongings by examining how personal archiving needs intersect with existing and emerging archiving technologies, best practices, and policies. Our findings not only confirmed that experienced home computer users are creating, receiving, and finding an increasing number of digital belongings, but also that they have already lost irreplaceable digital artifacts such as photos, creative efforts, and records. Although participants reported strategies such as backup and file replication for digital safekeeping, they were seldom able to implement them consistently. Four central archiving themes emerged from the data: (1) people find it difficult to evaluate the worth of accumulated materials; (2) personal storage is highly distributed both on- and offline; (3) people are experiencing magnified curatorial problems associated with managing files in the aggregate, creating appropriate metadata, and migrating materials to maintainable formats; and (4) facilities for long-term access are not supported by the current desktop metaphor. Four environmental factors further complicate archiving in consumer settings: the pervasive influence of malware; consumer reliance on ad hoc IT providers; an accretion of minor system and registry inconsistencies; and strong consumer beliefs about the incorruptibility of digital forms, the reliability of digital technologies, and the social vulnerability of networked storage., Comment: 6 pages, published in the Proceedings of IS&T Archiving 2006, (Ottawa, Canada, May 23-26, 2006), Society for Imaging Science and Technology, Springfield, VA, 2006, pp. 25-30