 I'm Cliff Lynch and I'll be leading this conversation this morning. The topic is really what we do about the fact that increasingly the analog of personal papers is turning into a very complicated digital thing and to try and understand at least a little bit of what that means for archives and research libraries and other institutions who are concerned with managing this kind of material. And basically I want to do three things this morning. The first is to just briefly cover a little bit of background on this area and point you to a few resources that you may or may not have come across to dig deeper. The second is to talk a little bit about a conference that I attended on the 16th of February that was taking a look at developments in this area and we're lucky to have Geoffie Blass here who was the person who put that conference together. I'll give you sort of three or four takeaways that I had from that that strike me as sort of fertile ground for action by cultural memory institutions. I'll invite Geoff to add his reflections on that meeting and then I'll open things up for a broader conversation about where we might go from here on some of these issues. So that's that's the agenda for the next the next hour or so. Now let me start as I said with some background on this and you know it's a kind of a common place assertion that more and more of our you know activities in our lives are being represented in digital form and email and in digital documents that even all of many of our sort of day to day transactions the kinds of things that filled up filing cabinets with old bank statements and canceled checks and airplane tickets and all that sort of wonderful stuff is moving into digital form. And you know certainly while many people throw this sort of thing away periodically there are lovely examples of important figures of a historical or literary nature who felt compelled to keep every check they wrote and made some biographer very happy later. And now of course there are some people who are doing this just quite automatically because the files get saved and they never think to purge them and there are others who are you know more systematic about eliminating this kind of material. Certainly there has been a lot of discussion over the past decade or so about you know personal habits and hygiene as it relates to personal computers and backup and this sort of activity. There were some you know very fascinating and frightening kinds of studies coming out in the early 2000s that suggested that at that time at least many consumers were not doing much backup and actually were adopting this sort of strange fatalistic attitude towards their digital files where they simply accepted the fact that they were all washed away every few years and you started over with you know most of having to replace most everything and you know just with a few leftover files that you might have saved for one reason or another and in fact you could even find interviews with people at that time who sort of welcomed that fragility and you know the sort of notion that you get this random technological clean slate every you know few years. Since then of course the whole kind of ease of backup has changed when you look at various incremental kind of automatic backup systems. We are starting to see the emergence of reasonably serious consumer oriented network backup services. Probably the biggest limiting factor is the relatively slow speed still of most home connections which limits your ability to back up over the net if you've got large numbers of files. But we're certainly seeing some significant changes over the past ten years. We've also seen some really good studies of people's behavior and practices and vulnerabilities in terms of digital material. Kathy Marshall for example has done a very very good set of studies in this area. One of the findings that she came up with that was very interesting talking to people primarily in the computer and information technology related fields was that one of the great points of vulnerability for digital files was when people changed jobs because in fact for better or worse they tended to get their personal and business files all tangled up together you know. I mean how many of us even today are really good about keeping our personal email utterly separate from our work email and that you know when people changed corporate affiliations or got fired or moved on that often this represented an enormous disruption and they tended to realize a few years later they'd actually lost a good deal of stuff in the course of that process. We've seen the emergence in information science of a subfield that goes by names like personal information management where people really focus a lot not just on what's kept but on how it's organized and on ideas like how people actually can find the things that they already have on their hard drives as those hard drives get bigger and accrete more and more material across time. So there are research groups for example at the University of Washington that have done a lot of work in that area. We've also seen a couple of other systematic efforts that are worth mentioning. Neil Bigary in the UK did a very very good study back around I think it was 2002 or 2003 called plenty of room at the bottom which really laid out this sort of notion of personal and small organizational digital archives and underscored the ramifications of those four cultural memory organizations. And perhaps the biggest scale thing I've seen in the last few years is the digital lives project that was run out of the British Library with funding from the JISC where Jeremy John was the principal investigator. They just quite recently put out a several hundred page report summarizing their findings. Jeremy is an interesting fellow. His title at the British Library is something like the Keeper of Electronic Manuscripts within the Archive Division and he's one of the few people that has spent a lot of time dealing with electronic manuscripts in a systematic way. That report out of the British Library is very very much worth reading I would say if you're interested in this and I included the URL for it in the background material for this session. There I should also say just kind of rounding out a little bit of this survey material that there's also been a sort of a futuristic strain strung through all of this too. For example you have people like Gordon Bell who is a very prominent computer scientist who's currently with Microsoft Research who has been basically digitizing everything having to do with his life for the last few years. So he's trying to essentially move all of the documentation of his existence into digital form. You have things like the proposals that came out a few years ago from ARPA about life logging and similar kinds of things. It's not clear to me where a lot of that research stands but certainly there's a whole thread that says as we can collect more material systematically what can we do with it. And then there are also sort of sub pieces to this that raise questions for example about can we use technology to help people whose memories are failing for example, can we use technology to help people whose memories are failing for example, people who might be in the early stages of Alzheimer's or having other problems that are affecting their memory. Elderly people who are trying to remain independent but are sometimes having difficulty remembering things and so there's been a number of R&D projects to look at kind of selective visual capture and things like that to help these people and that threads its way through some of this work as well. The last thing I want to say by way of kind of general background here is that it's important to realize that archives are operating a little bit in a rear view mirror. They tend to be ingesting and acquiring collections that have been built up over the past you know 10 or 20 or 30 years and so they tend to be seeing a lot of sort of last decades problems as they do their ingestion. So right now for example you see archeology archives who when they acquire an individual's personal papers will find a you know devil's brew of paper of actual machines in many cases because it turns out that there are a lot of well I don't know about a lot but there are certainly a number of people who kind of identify quanta of work with machines so for example there are novelists who will buy a machine write a novel put that machine and that novel in the closet it's done get a new machine and move on to the next book and if they need to go back to the old book for some reason the old you know machine comes out of the closet and they try and boot it up and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't and this is actually you know there's more than one person who's you know described exactly this kind of authorial behavior to me as something they're seeing in their acquisitions. Certainly one of the other things we're seeing is showing up in acquisitions today is the legacy of the early days of the personal computer and the you know sort of blossoming of word processing in the 80s. All kinds of nasty removable media filled with all kinds of nasty files from word processors long gone and never properly documented and these are a real problem. Now the interesting thing is that people are reading this as sort of you know and this will continue to be a problem whereas my guess is it's going to continue to be a problem for a while but if you think about the last decade for example there are a very very small number of dominant word processors and plenty of tools for converting among them. That market has really consolidated and you know some people would say stabilized other people would say ossified perhaps but it's really a very very different world than that dynamic world of the late 80s and early 90s in word processors. The reason I mention this is because I think it's important to think about what's ahead about what special collections people and archivists are going to be running into in 2020. And there's been at least a little bit of very useful thinking about that in the context of things like the digital lives project and actually we can also see this in other sorts of social settings. For example people dealing with the digital files of folks like Sturgeon and I think it's important to think about what's ahead of the soldiers who have been killed where parents or other family want to set up some kind of memorial or bring those files to conclusion in some way. What we're seeing is that back in the 80s and 90s and even into the early 2000s the kind of typical model was that individuals were in possession of most of their files. They were on those removable media or local computer systems by and large. Whereas today their stuff is actually scattered across a huge range of systems out there in the so-called cloud. Various kinds of social sharing systems, flicker, email systems that don't follow a model of keeping most of the material local but rather out in the cloud somewhere. This is a very different kind of a situation than we faced before and one where you can imagine it really would be tremendously difficult for someone without the active complicity of the individual to go and recover substantial amounts of this and reassemble it in an orderly way. So I think that we need to be very mindful and I'll come back to some of the direct implications of this of what the cloud era is likely to mean in terms of our ability to capture and manage the digital documentation of the lives of individuals and small organizations. I think there's an enormous problem brewing here. The last thing I'll just say about that cloud environment is that it's not just the personal files. One of the other things that happens in that cloud environment is my personal files start getting interrelated to other people's personal files and there's a whole question of who should be responsible for the record of the relationships. Is the right way to think about capturing one person's material, their material and the relationships attached to it? If so, how many hops out do you go? Or is a better way to think about these social systems that they contain lots of sort of individual material and then these big spanning graphs of relationships and we should try and work out ways where major institutions partner with some of these major social sites to actually capture the entire graph in some fashion and sort through all of the privacy horrors and things like that that are implicit in that. We really don't know very much about this whole question of what the right approaches are to this world of cloud-based systems. Social services yet and its connection to documenting the lives of individuals but it is abundantly clear that there are some new and hard issues there. Let me step on though with that bit of background to the meeting that Jeff pulled together. It was a meeting to really start talking about some of these issues in part from the perspective of memory organizations and it was very appropriately held at the new home of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, a disused church of Christian science that Brewster Kale has recently acquired. It is the new home for the archive complete with beautiful enormous yellow stained glass windows that allow the light to stream into the main meeting room. It's really quite a spectacular place and they have a stage with these ranks of about three or four foot high figures, a little bit like the Chinese soldiers from 2000 years ago, representing the archivists who have served at the Internet Archive standing guard around the stage. It's a spectacular place as you can imagine for such a meeting. We spent a day, a group of people, talking through some of these issues. I'm not going to say too much about the details of the meeting. There are very good notes up. I've got a pointer to the notes in the background material in the program book. I do want to sort of share four points that I came away with very strongly that perhaps will be useful as a point of departure in our conversation and then I'm going to give Jeff a couple of minutes to share his takeaways on it. I think one of the things that I was quite struck by is that archives and special collections and other memory organizations are not alone in this world. There is a major sort of privatization thing happening. Some of it starts with genealogy. There's enough money in genealogy now that for those of you who sometimes find yourself flipping around on the TV late at night, folks like ancestry.com have got enough money to run TV ads now. Admittedly, they're not doing it on the Olympics, but nonetheless they are running TV ads, which suggests to me there's a certain momentum there. It's clear that while the original starting point for a lot of this was sort of hardcore genealogy, it's moving more to document your family history, upload photos, this sort of thing. There are a number of tools in this area. In fact, we heard a very interesting talk by someone from the Magnus Museum in Berkeley who is working with one of these tools. They're a museum of Jewish history. He's working with people to document stuff that he can take in using a Mac-based tool. Again, a very clever kind of activity. Using this to structure material to make sure that it's easy for you to acquire. There's also a whole set of kind of new players like StoryCorps who are doing oral histories primarily, who fit into this world as well. We've seen some of this in the U.S. We've seen perhaps even more aggressively in the U.K. organizations like the BBC moving into large-scale public oral history in various areas. That's one observation that I think we ought to be thinking about how we work with some of these institutions and where we're concerned about things getting locked up, where, on the other hand, we may see very fruitful collaborations. Second point, and I can't stress this one strongly enough. Again, speaking to this sort of backwards, this rear view mirror business with understanding what's facing archives, the future is really much more heavily multimedia. If you just look at data, for example, about the number of photographs or digital images that people capture and store as opposed to their behavior back in the days of film photography, there's really been orders of magnitude increase here. The notion that you're going to get hundreds of thousands of photos from many, many people is not at all unreasonable. We are going to have to stop thinking about particularly images and probably also moving images as sort of esoteric things and think about just expecting them in very, very large quantities and poorly described often or described only in kind of contextual ways. Here's a cluster of images from March 7th. Here's another cluster of images from last year's Christmas time. You may not know who's in it, but you'll know something about where and when they were taken because that just comes automatically, increasingly, with the images. I think the implications of that kind of multimedia are pretty scary for a lot of special collections because they've just never had to deal with this before. Except for fairly rare cases, photographs, images were off somewhere else. They were a specialty problem, not something that comes with almost every acquisition. The next, the third of my four points, deposit agreements. Certainly we have lots of experience with deeds of gift and deposit agreements that people execute to transfer material over to an archive or a special collection. It seems like in the digital world, we need to think very carefully about what goes into those deeds of gift and even more we need to think about the trust context around it. I'll just give you kind of a couple of really quick examples here. Many people, and again it's dangerous to talk generalities here, but many people really aren't hugely sophisticated about things like, well, what could you recover off of my computer if I gave it to you in terms of files that were erased but not zeroed out and browser histories and browser caches and all this sort of thing. You actually have some scholars now who are talking about what can we do with computer forensic tools, the sorts of things that were designed for law enforcement organizations or intelligence organizations to see what they could dig up on you if they got a hold of your computer, even assuming that you were sophisticated about this stuff. I kind of wonder where that leaves someone thinking about making such a donation. There's always been an issue of trust between archivists or curators on one side and folks who donate material, be it an individual or their family after donating deceased individuals papers. It seems like the whole issue of trust and appropriate behavior is really ratcheted up here because of the tendency to intermix all kinds of personal and business activity and fairly trivial things and important things in the computing environment. I think that it might be very fruitful to have some conversations about model deeds of gift and deposit agreements for various kinds of material in this digital world. People right now as far as I've been able to determine are just kind of making it up as they go along and this might be a place where at least we could share some experience. The last point that I want to make and it's a very sort of strategic one that I took away is that waiting until people die, for example, and then reaching out to their families is going to be an increasingly ineffective tactic in the digital world especially when you think of live scattered across all of these cloud services. Especially when you think about people dying in a what a digitally-intestate way. I don't know what the right term is but they forgot to hand over the password dossier to their heirs along with establishing who's going to be their literary heir and all of that sort of thing. Big mess potentially. Also a very disorganized one. You don't even know where to start looking for a great deal of this material. The question becomes does it make more sense to reach out to people whose material you'd like to acquire for your collections and to do it early? Is that a better strategy? Perhaps it is. It means you're now into this sort of odd mixture of development in that you'd like to get them to give it to you. Hopefully for not too much money or for free even better. Relationship building in the sense that you may want to be giving them advice about how to organize things before you get it so that they keep drafts of things that might be interesting to future scholars if they're willing to do that so that you can help separate out the personal and the less personal. When do you start though? I had an interesting conversation last year with some folks from the National Library of Wales. Part of their mission is to capture the Welsh literature. This is a good mission to have in a way because the number of people who are writing literature in Welsh are limited and you know who most of them are. At least if you're the National Library of Wales. You can actually reach out to them quite early in their careers and help them with things like backup and basic information management on one side and build relationships on the other. That's pretty doable for an enterprise on that scale I guess. You think about what should a major research library be doing? Certainly local faculty are a reasonable place to reach out. Beyond that how do you decide who to reach out to? Is collection development going to start encompassing the identification of promising individuals early in their careers whatever those careers may be and setting out to develop those relationships? By the way how does this flip around to the personal side? As an up and coming literary figure or public historian or something like that are you graded in part on who you've got your archiving relationships with? Does that make you important because a prominent institution has reached out and said let's work together we'd like to archive you downstream. You're clearly a rising star. One can imagine some very strange kind of social output from this but nonetheless the sort of core take away here is that it's going to get less and less practical to do a thorough job on the digital lives of individuals if they are picked up very, very late in the process and particularly after the individual who created them dies unless that individual was pretty unusually systematic about making provisions for this to happen. Those were probably the four biggest conclusions that I left this meeting with. I'd like to open this up to discussion particularly about this question of what are the actionable strategies for memory institutions in this area? What should they be doing and what are useful prospects for areas where groups of these institutions might collaborate? But just before I do that I want to give Jeff an opportunity to say a few things briefly about his reflections on that meeting. Why don't you just grab that. Thank you very much Cliff. That was a really good summary and thank you for the support at that meeting at the Internet Archive. I think Drew, other people there to have you attend. A couple of things struck me during the meeting. One is the extent to which we're all stakeholders in what happens. We're all stakeholders in personal archives. You can open a discussion with people who are very far from our field with a question like well what would it be worth to you to have a videotape of your great grandparents. So this is a topic that I think allows us to connect with the public in a much deeper and more pervasive way than maybe we tend to. The second point that came up during this meeting for me at least was how conceptually rich and how varied the topic can be. There were a lot of different frames for thinking about personal collections ranging from things that were fairly prosaic like scrapbooking to things that were very deep conceptually like what's our relationship to time. A third point was around the collection activities that we have. There's something like five billion cell phones in the world. More than half of them take pictures. The scope and quantity and scale of digital collections that we have is just growing very, very fast. Part of what I've been trying to do since the meeting and in advance of the meeting is to gather ideas and examples of best practices and I would be very interested in hearing from anyone here about projects they're involved in and problems that they're trying to solve. In the background material there's a pointer to the website www.personalarchiving.com and as Cliff said there were no notes up. I'm still waiting. This was a stone soup sort of a conference and I got voluntary help of lots of different kinds and soon, soon there will be videos up of all the sessions waiting on the editors for that. I would be particularly interested and grateful for examples of institutions that have started to grapple with this or that have ideas about what are appropriate policies for memory institutions. There were a number of projects. I'm just going to go down them kind of quickly and then I'll be done that were discussed at the meeting that seemed like they could be translated into action without a huge investment on anybody's part. One is to start documenting case histories. There are a lot of silos. One of the things that came out during this meeting was the diversity of interest in the topic and people working away on their own project kind of in isolation from others. Case studies at this point would be very useful. Case studies might also help illuminate some of the economics of personal archiving. If we can get to fixed costs, like what does it really cost to turn a box of documents into something like a personal archive, then we can begin to engage with funders in a much more intelligent way and with donors as well. Another project that was suggested by researcher at Yahoo, Elizabeth Churchill, is on interface design and interface competition. What if we were able to get a few examples of personal collections cooperating with people in the computer human interaction world and started to have an interface design competition for what a good personal archive might look like. Cliff mentioned the way that our data is scattered across different services. Mark Smith brought up the idea of a web sponge. How can we go out and collect all the material that's on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services and put it into one place? Another colleague in starting the meeting, Judith Zisman, mentioned Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood has books and papers and she started a Twitter account and her fans have started to make comments about her materials and two people have pretended to be Margaret Atwood. So what is the boundary around the personal archive there? Is it what she says? Is it what people say about her? Is what fake people claim to be? So there's a real boundary issue that we haven't begun to address in an intelligent way. And then finally there's this issue of social consensus. There is a sense that, oh my gosh, there's way too much of this material for us ever to hope to collect it or it's not important or it's too expensive. We don't have an economic model for it and I think moving towards some social consensus that this is an important thing for us to do, that it's tractable, that it's possible, would probably cause things to move ahead in a much faster way. It looks like we'll have a repeat of this meeting in February 2011. Stay tuned at personal archiving.com and I would love to hear from people here about projects they're involved in and questions they have. I guess you already might. Yes, thank you. And I'll just say, as planning goes along for this 2011 meeting, as video becomes available for the old one, I'll forward announcements out to CNI Announce as well about those developments. Let's open this up for comments and discussion though. When I think about newer things, I think one of the first things I run to is an analogy of how we did things in the analog world. So let me just take a couple of the things here and analogize them, is that the word? It seems to me that one of the, in the analog world, we don't try to solve all the problems. Typically an archive gets far too much material for them to even look at or organize and they organize it on a very high level in boxes and in folders. And one of the things that I think has made one of the most significant impacts on the archivist's job is the is the commercial sector marketing pendefects folders, manila folders and pendefects, pendeflex dividers. And just the act of that and that's permeation within the general populace has served to really serve archivists and then archivists don't even look in the folders. So the analogy of can you read the stuff that's in there? Do you have the ability? They leave that for the researchers. So that's kind of one idea from an analogy. Could we think of some way to kind of at a high level help people organize things themselves and then we take that analogy and at that high level and we let the researchers worry about the lower level. That's one kind of idea. Another analogy is the dead people analogy or get them before they're dead. At least amongst powerful or famous people or people who are concerned with their legacy, museums cultivate these people long, long before they're dead, sometimes early in their career, sometimes mid career collectors, artists and and they cultivate them and they work with them and they advise them about how their they should do certain things if they're concerned about their legacy and you know at at NYU we've been actually gotten very involved in some of these things where particularly with artists that do complex and difficult to remount works, we've actually gotten them to hire our graduates, David Byrne, Vito Akanshi. You know they're concerned about their legacy. We're working on Lori Anderson. We've already done a project with her and she's she's scared. She's really scared that all of this stuff is not going to be available and and and nowhere to be seen. So these you know to kind of you know that that people who are concerned about their legacy if they become aware of these things, if you can make them aware, they if they're if they really care about their legacy scare them, right? I mean we found that pretty effective on the few people we've worked with. So it sounds like the world of archives and libraries may really have something to learn from museums in this area and and perhaps some of there there's some things in the interstices to like film producers who where I'd imagine the issues are very similar. And and even well even at NYU with with our archive our fails collection which is an archive among other things of of kind of cutting-edge artists from the 70s and 80s. The archive the fails archive cultivates people and has put on shows of people or had events for people long before they died in order to cultivate their collection either an individual or an organization. And and and really pressured those organizations to get things in order before they come in so that they're not misinterpreted. Interesting phrase. Yes I said that purposely. You know from that's what they say to them so that they're not misinterpreted. We know that interpretation is going to happen in all different directions but yeah. Thanks for that. Other comments or thoughts on this? I think what I have is a bit more of a comment but I was very struck by what you were talking about when you were talking about the deeds of gift and trust because what I'm working on now I'm a university archivist and I'm working with a recently retired president who definitely has that mixture of the personal and the work records electronically all together but also with our new president who is one of those who really would like to he's he's he's going that sort of route of everything in my professional and in some cases my personal life I want digital I want it in the cloud I and I want you to preserve it so so it's that challenge but one of the things that I'm noticing is in that deed of gift and in that discussion what we're running into because I'm with the new president I'm documenting his electronic records every single term so that because I don't want them to disappear on me but the challenge then comes in all sorts of issues of not only confidentially confidentiality and privacy but I'm noticing that in the realm of paper where I never had this much in the digital realm my donors are much more concerned about the sensitive records the records that if you look at them out of context they're there they could have very different meeting if they end I've had the one of the donors say to me they're like yes those electronic records they're slippery and so it's that it's that sense that even though I am a trusted and well thought of archivist on our campus that it's it's sort of as if I have to start all over again with them when it comes to their electronic records it's a new discussion and they're a little bit more concerned than they ever used to be so now that I'm documenting everybody much more early I'm not waiting for them to retire or die or anything like that they're much more concerned than they ever would be about what I'm doing with their records right now and so that would be a discussion that I would be very interested to see continue and see how we handle this both in an institutional setting but then also with a with the personal archives and those personal settings because I work in those as well thanks my question is somewhat quick but it comes from something an archivist told me I'm actually a computer programmer but I work with special collections and archives a lot and at the University I worked in in 1968 there was a huge riot from the Vietnam War but also from a whole other issue on campus and with the archivist basically said to me was if we have another one of those today we won't know where to begin to start archiving what happened so I guess my question is not sure how to articulate it exactly but we keep thinking about kind of going out and thinking about the people that might want to donate but what about the people that we never thought about would eventually donate you know do I start harvesting Twitter feeds for everything at my University for the hope that when something happens you know we have a list and I'm not really sure how to think about it exactly but as a program I want to help and I don't know exactly what to do about it well I don't know if this is really helpful but certainly one of the things that I think there's been some very provocative experimenting on is the notion that there's an event that happens whether it's a riot or a national natural disaster like you know Katrina or an earthquake or you know 9-11 or yes a good example Howard's reminding me of is the the situation at Virginia Tech a few years ago where people realize very quickly something's happening and there's this sort of you know really the right way to describe it is almost by analogy with you know the kind of observational apparatus in the sciences just like you know somebody spots something in the sky and they point the you know they point a large telescope at it to really see what's going on they'll do these for events now where they'll start capturing systematically all of the media coverage as much of the social media coverage as they can get they will often couple that with a strategy to reach out to people who were witnesses involved and take you know oral history or other testimony another piece of it is that they'll try and mobilize people who are there to capture material so that it's not just they're harvesting up the you know kind of traditional media but they'll encourage anybody with a cell phone you know who's got a piece of this to to contribute them and and you see these sites now built up around some of these events Ed Fox from Virginia Tech has been working on a project for a couple of years and has presented on it here about essentially a digital library for crisis management and capture so that's that's one piece of it but very much a sort of recognize it when it happens contemporaneously and mobilize to capture this question of you know how you find people way later who might have a piece of it that's that's you know the sort of classic problem that that that we've always had you know where many many people at some point in their lives touched something you know that might be very significant that often they don't talk about for one reason or another but you'd really like to capture that Jim so my set of experiences is from a very narrow part of the personal archiving world and sort of the most sort of conservative but close to home for a lot of these institutions slice that is is not about the big unmasked five billion cell phones but about individual faculty members in their personal collections and I think what's really what I see a lot of our resource allocation issues facing libraries about how much to invest in in documenting capturing taking care of faculty personal collections image collections in my case but it could be other things so that the case that we see a lot of is the faculty member who has his or her own images and either used to keep them on his own or used to dump them in a slide library where the investment amount of investment needed to make that that resource useful was pretty minimal it was maybe you have to put them in drawers so now as as faculty members are showing up or not showing up with their own image collections the the institution is faced with do we invest staff time in in cataloging and in managing the assets how much how do we prioritize what which collections to do the difficult political collection decisions of saying oh well your photography is good or you're at a site that's really important and yours is just not you know and then so we're gonna invest you know catalogers or graduate student time in documenting that and these are collections that the you know the Picasso four-star system doesn't work you know if you're looking at Islamic textiles you need the metadata out of someone's brain or you need to put a graduate student working with them and so all those collections either are going to stay private which is happening I think more and more and so the faculty member manages his or own her own FileMaker Pro database takes it when she leaves campus or get into the institutional flow which is important both for the long-term care of what are the valuable collections there important for the institution because then they're investing time in internal collection building that can be used in other courses or things like that but there has to be agreements on sort of who owns what and you know does it copy stay here and all that stuff so that as I say that's not about the five billion cell phones and what they're capturing those are just the people hanging around our campuses which we're either going to have a role at integrating to what we we do or or we're not and they're going to be off on their own and they're going to you know rotten the equivalent of cardboard boxes in their basement the digital versions of those when they die and so we have we have lots of case studies of where those investments have been made and what it takes to do it and but you know but those are those are just in cases that we've run across but I think how institutions are facing that when somebody shows up and says here's my camera and I just came back from a dig and you know they're 900 images and I need them tomorrow so please catalog them well I I think that's a that's a very you know important point with a with a with a strong message in the sense that at least when we talk about the universities there's a you know specific population that you could argue the universities have a a special responsibility to and a special relationship with and that's their own faculty as those faculty build up collections of of materials and and personal history which is relevant sometimes here too that needs to be organized and preserved I actually you know find myself thinking a lot now about whether the whole sort of retirement process for faculty need some really focused attention because that's actually a very special time in the information life cycle many faculty at that point are primarily concerned with legacy and with the carrying on of their work and the continued availability of material they spent a lifetime putting together they've you know sort of moved past this business of I'm reluctant to share data until I'm certain I've gotten everything possible out of it they've gotten time some in some cases at least to spend a little time with someone from the library or graduate student helping to organize this material yet we don't seem to do much systematic at least at most of the institutions I've talked to and this is a question I go around asking fairly often as I make the rounds of institutions now it's a little different in the sense that probably the material that's of greatest interest there is scholarly evidence that the faculty member has has collected that you want to bring forward as opposed to biographical material but you know many many of the other issues around it stay pretty constant I I've seen a lot less analysis of that situation than I'd like and I'd really urge you at some point to think about how you might share some of those case studies that you alluded to we really need a lot more case studies in this area we're starting to get a little tight on time let's take one last question or comment before we wind down well I just it's mainly a common few ideas bouncing around that I can try to pull together but I'm thinking about my own life that it's publicly documented online it's on Facebook it's on Flickr it's on Twitter and increasingly that's what's happening our lives are being documented online as we want to present them and the context in which we do that is really critical as well so it doesn't make sense to harvest my Twitter feeds and remove them from the context in which they were posted because the you know that's really important especially things like Facebook and and I'm reacting to what's going on you know around me and around my friends that are online and etc and when people you see now when people die those sites those Facebook pages become memorials yes and it's funny that you know we've moved from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook but you don't take down that Myspace page even though their friends have left because that was the last point in which they publicly documented their own life and so it's a memorial and I can see the potential for because you know so many people are now publicly documenting their lives online that a service will come up that will memorialize you and when you die and it'll it'll kind of pull together your Facebook and Myspace and Flickr and whatever and Twitter and people will be able to go there and I think that's going to happen soon I think it the time is probably ripe for it and maybe that kind of service when it comes because it will be something that can provide a model for special collections for archives because somebody in the marketplace is going to figure some of this out in a way where it keeps the context you know in its price in it online which is where which is where it belongs not divorced from that so maybe we'll see that soon maybe we'll start that business there was a archaeologist discover lost friends or civilization on the onion up a while ago that is totally worth watching it's a video all right well I thank you for joining us this is a this is a topic that as I say we'll be returning to in you know other for and future meetings I personally think it's a very central one and one that you know gradually is going to cause more and more challenges for us and and to the extent we can at least intellectually get out in front of it a little bit it will be very valuable I mean the scale of the problem is pretty daunting but it's one where I think we need we need to seek opportunities to get some intellectual leverage so thank you all for joining us if you have you know further thoughts case studies best practices things like that please do be in touch thanks again