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The article discusses what one might do with a life's worth of digital memories and the applications that might prove useful. It also considers reasons why one might not want to keep everything, outlines research challenges and identifies the leverage that having a complete life record could bring to personal information management problems. It is reported that the primary research challenge in digital memories is how to cope with the vast quantity of material. Summarization, abstraction and data mining approaches can be helpful in identifying important items, though what is important to one person may not be important to another. Use of multiple levels of detail and resolution is desirable for reviewing all captured media, especially sensor data. Another challenge is posed by making use of the increasing number and types of data sources primarily from ubiquitous sensors. It is concluded that however, difficult, technological, legal and social issues must also be solved to make lifetime recording valuable.

The article provides the highlights of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2012 Conference on Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visual Analytics held in Rome, Italy, from September 17 to 20. The conference was attended by more than 190 people. Keynote speaker Tobias Schreck discussed the application of visual analytics in document repositories.