Jamie Andrews
Digital Lives at the British Library
The Digital Lives Research Project was an AHRC-funded collaboration between the British Library, University College London, and the University of Bristol, and in its initial stage ran from 2007 until 2009. The project focused on personal digital archives and their relationship with research repositories, and brought together curatorial and academic expertise from fields as varied as: digital preservation; literary scholarship; web archiving; history of science; oral history; Intellectual Property law.
The project engaged with creators, curators, and users of personal digital archives through one-to-one interviews, workshop days, an international conference (held in both Second Life and real world environments), and on-line surveys to capture data relating to the entire life-cycle of digital archives; in this paper I will synthesize some of these findings, giving examples of new kinds of digital behaviours, and suggest how these might inform institutional approach to archiving new personal digital archives. The paper will draw mostly on the findings of the Digital Lives report, but will also include practical examples from the British Library’s newly accessible digital theatre collections.
The project engaged with creators, curators, and users of personal digital archives through one-to-one interviews, workshop days, an international conference (held in both Second Life and real world environments), and on-line surveys to capture data relating to the entire life-cycle of digital archives; in this paper I will synthesize some of these findings, giving examples of new kinds of digital behaviours, and suggest how these might inform institutional approach to archiving new personal digital archives. The paper will draw mostly on the findings of the Digital Lives report, but will also include practical examples from the British Library’s newly accessible digital theatre collections.
