Identifying the contours of personal archiving research: a scoping review

The term “personal archiving” has slowly made its way into the academic literature in descriptions of the making and keeping of personal archives in contexts independent of traditional archives institutions. Yet there is little research on how the term describing this phenomenon came to be and why it is seldom deployed in archival studies’ research intended for the archives sector. In a recent publication exploring the origins of data archives and contemporary discourses of privacy, Acker (2025) retraces the lexical history of the terms archives, archive and archiving, within which disciplinary divisions between personal archives and personal archiving research are situated. According to Acker (2025), archival studies research has consistently preferred the use of “archives” (a noun) to the use of “archiving” (a verb). The term “archive” was not commonly used as a verb until 1999; it is a term that professional archivists resist because it is thought to distort common understanding of what professional archivists' work includes. In the realm of archives practice as work, terms represent efforts to separate professionals from hobbyists. The use of archive as a verb has roots in the term “data archiving”, which was used by computing professionals to describe processes associated with data storage. Acker notes that despite this resistance, “archive” increasingly has been used as a verb in professional archival studies literature since the early 2000s. Acker's (2025) analysis may be applicable to understanding the use of the term personal archiving: the term “personal archiving” may serve as an example of how different interpretations of archive as a noun or archive as a verb evolve over time and how different actors, across different locations, engage in tasks associated with making and keeping personal archives.

We conducted a scoping review to understand the landscape of literature described as personal archiving research and how it evolved over 3 decades. Our objective was to understand how the term “personal archiving” is conceptualised in research over a 30-year period, to gain insight into how it relates to broader discussions about the making and keeping of archives untethered from discussion of professional archivists’ practices and jurisdictional control. We believe that whether one utilises the term “personal archives” or “personal archiving” is more than a mere disciplinary preference: it signals a divide about what it means to perform contemporary archives work and the role of professional archivists in increasingly digital societies, where interacting with archives can regularly occur without interacting with a professional archivist.

Professional archivists experienced a similar divide 2 decades ago when the existence of community archives was initially perceived as a threat to professional archivists' legitimacy (Flinn, 2007). The archival sector eventually came to embrace community archives as a valid topic of research inquiry that could inform professional archivists' practices. We believe that the archival studies sector may be experiencing a similar divide in regard to personal archiving. Should “personal archiving” as a practice be positioned largely outside the realm of interest of professional archivists and the broader field of archival studies or should personal archiving research and practices be acknowledged as resources that may inform the future of archival studies scholarship and archivists' work practices?

At present, personal archiving is loosely-defined within scholarly literature with several different terms being used in research including “personal digital archiving” (Marshall, 2007); “personal recordkeeping,” (Condron, 2019); “personal collection” (Cooper, 2016); “curation” (Mičunović et al., 2016a, b); and “lifelogging” (Jones et al., 2008; Trace and Zhang, 2020). The use of a variety of different terms can blur distinctions between personal archiving. Personal archiving often refers to the making and keeping of personal archives by lay individuals. This contrasts with personal archives, which broadly refers to research that explores the concept of “personal” in records held by archival institutions and records managed by professional archivists described as personal collections (Douglas and Mills, 2018). A secondary aim of our research is to explore the underpinnings of why these two similar terms are considered distinct.

Describing the activity of personal archiving as what it is not (archives held by institutions that employ professional archivists) is ambiguous yet common: researchers have described personal archiving as taking place in the home (Speer and Jones, 2022; Petrelli and Whittaker, 2010), the workplace (Barreau and Nardi, 1995; Whittaker and Hirschberg, 2001), with family (Karanikolas and Skourlas, 2014), with friends (Ashmore et al., 2012), with significant others (Kirk and Sellen, 2010; Sas and Whittaker, 2013) or in the process of making art (Jones, 2015). Personal archiving as an activity is not bound by format. Personal archiving can include engagement with digital items (Cushing, 2010, 2012), paper-based items (Hobbs, 2001) or a mix of different media (Petrelli et al., 2009). The specifics of the behaviour or activity also remain unclear. These can include hoarding (Chen, 2014), bringing the items together (Kirk and Sellen, 2010), evaluating and appraising the items (Cushing, 2010; Marshall, 2007), preserving (Speer and Jones, 2022), educating the public (Acker and Brubaker, 2014) or supporting donors who eventually deposit collections in institutional archives (Cunningham, 1994; Paquet, 2000). When personal archiving is likely to occur also varies. It can occur every day (Bruce, 2005; Jones, 2007), over a lifetime (Kim, 2013) or at the end of one's life (Acker and Brubaker, 2014; Ashenfelder, 2011).

Kim (2013) refers to personal archiving as a “movement” but does not go into specific detail. A social movement is loosely defined as a group of people working together to achieve a specific goal (Scott and Marshall, 2009). Personal archiving may not rise to the level of a social movement but the activity does appear to have grown in popularity in tandem with the use of personal computers, cloud storage, social media and smartphones (Acker, 2025; Ashenfelder et al., 2013). Beyond individuals attempting to manage personal digital collections created as a result of the use of personal technologies, designers have conducted research on personal archiving to further advance these technologies. Understanding how and why individuals maintain digital material supports the development of new tools, software and apps for maintaining personal digital items (Van Kleek and O'Hara, 2014).

In summary, existing research provides ambiguous pictures as to what the phenomenon of personal archiving includes. While general ideas of what personal archiving is and why it is of potential interest to researchers align with a variety of different disciplinary interests, the literature tends to explore personal archiving as a means to an end: to develop software, tools or (digital) archives practice.

Scoping reviews summarise, map and analytically reinterpret the breadth and depth of a research field (Levac et al., 2010). Researchers map gaps and evidence in the literature by presenting their findings in user-friendly formats like graphs, figures or searchable databases (Mikae-Lye et al., 2016). They are particularly suited for addressing broad research questions about an area of interest and assessing the state of knowledge in a particular field, especially within those where a variety of different study designs are used simultaneously (Arksey and O'Malley, 2005, p. 20). Topics of recent scoping reviews in information studies include data cultures (Oliver et al., 2023) and family carers' information practices (Dalmer, 2020).

According to Arskey and O'Malley (2005), a scoping review involves five stages: 1) identifying the research question; 2) identifying relevant studies; 3) study selection; 4) charting the data and 5) collating, summarizing and reporting the results. Researchers conducting scoping reviews must strike a careful balance between the comprehensiveness of their search and factors related to project feasibility, including time constraints and efficiency (Levac et al., 2010; Du et al., 2026). In this project, our aim was to understand how the term personal archiving was deployed in research about the making and keeping of archives largely untethered from discussion of professional archivists’ practices and jurisdictional control over a thirty year period. Our desire was not to disregard existing research about “personal archives” that describes collections managed by professional archivists but to untangle discussions about a phenomenon we believe has been overlooked in discussions of archiving as an activity. As research about this phenomenon is largely conducted outside of traditional archival studies publication venues, our goal was to gather it together as a corpus to which we could apply analysis.

In determining the boundaries of the scoping corpus, we decided to include literature that described lay individuals' (as opposed to professional archivists') making and keeping of archives over time. We did this by limiting our evaluation of relevant articles to those using “personal archiving” versus “personal archives.”

Prior to formally searching the literature, we conducted a pilot search to evaluate the impact of different search parameters (e.g. wildcards, limiters and synonyms) on the comprehensiveness of returned results when searching specialist and multidisciplinary databases. We found the inclusion of wildcards and synonyms in our pilot search query reduced the search precision without increasing recall of relevant publications. For this reason, we settled on a more simplistic keyword search strategy requiring exact matches to balance the need for breadth and efficiency in our search process. After piloting our search strategy, we decided to use the single search query (“personal” AND “archiving”) with a limitation that the two keywords had to appear in the abstract field. We limited our search results by time period, allowing publications from January 1994 to January 2025 (when we began the research project) to be included in the results. Due to project resources and timeline constraints, we chose to limit results to the English language and to limit our search to peer-reviewed publications including research articles, book chapters in article format (e.g. Lee and Capra, 2011) and conference proceedings.

Based on the outcome of our charting pilot, we decided to exclude full-length books that summarised existing literature without empirical findings because they lacked sufficient detail on the definitions of personal archiving used by the authors cited as well as on their research designs, which were central to our research aims. Furthermore, their length introduced inefficiencies in our data charting process, which negatively impacted the feasibility of our scoping review due to our limited time and project resources. We acknowledge the exclusion of full-length books as a potential limitation of this scoping review but we believe the impact on our findings is minimal due to the small number of excluded items within this category.

To identify relevant studies, we conducted our search in two phases. First, we conducted a series of identical keyword searches across three specialist databases: Library and Information Studies Abstracts (LISA), Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) and Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library. These specialist databases were selected because of their institutional availability and comprehensive coverage of peer-reviewed journals, periodicals and conference proceedings in LIS and archival studies (e.g. in combination, LISA and LISTA enable search of close to 500 periodicals and peer-reviewed journals). Selection of these databases ensured that we had comprehensive coverage of information studies, library and archival perspectives within the dataset. We also sought to ensure strong representation of cognate disciplines that have approached the topic of personal archiving from a variety of technological perspectives (e.g. ACM Digital Library includes coverage for over 275 conference proceedings and over 400 K full-text articles across computing, media and design fields).

After running our search, obtaining the search results from each database and removing duplicates, each author independently reviewed the title and abstract for each item to make a selection decision using the study's inclusion and exclusion criteria. Upon completion, the authors reviewed the decisions made for each entry, and disagreements between authors about whether or not to include an item were resolved through discussion and further review of the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Next, we used manual backwards citation-chaining to find additional literature not captured by our initial keyword search. In the manual backwards citation-chaining set, we reviewed the titles of all items included in the references of included items. Any time that an item appeared remotely related was extracted and collated. After removing duplicates, abstracts for the newly discovered items were retrieved; we used the same inclusion and exclusion criteria table, and resolution process to make our final selection decisions.

Our data charting and mapping was organised by four sub-questions: (1) where does personal archiving research get published? (2) Who researches personal archiving? (3) What motivates personal archiving research and what does it mean? And (4) how is personal archiving studied? For each sub-question, we identified and extracted text from each included work that could be used in amalgamation to arrive at an answer and satisfy our overall research objectives. Relevant text was extracted into a shared spreadsheet, which was later used to map the evidence collected during the charting phase. Each author reviewed and extracted relevant content from half of the included studies into a spreadsheet. Descriptive statistics were performed to “count” the occurrence of different data about the publications, including publication type, publication venue, publication date, author frequency, author affiliation, data collection techniques and data analysis techniques. This allowed us to present our findings in the form of tables and graphs that visually illustrate trends and gaps in the literature for readers.

Some data were analysed using qualitative coding to allow the data to be grouped thematically into categories that would allow for meaningful quantitative analysis and visualisation. For example, publication venue names were qualitatively pre-processed using WorldCat.org-assigned United States Library of Congress subject headings as a deductive code that indicated its main disciplinary audience. To determine the disciplines of authors, affiliated unit names were deductively coded using the International Standard Classification of Education: Fields of Education and Training 2013, (UNESCO, 2015) prior to quantitative analysis.

In addition, the first author inductively coded excerpts of dataset publications that detail aims and objectives and definitions of terms; text we extracted from the literature that addressed the aims, motivation and/or purpose of the research. Within discussions of purpose, motivation and objectives, most authors contextualise the “why” of personal archiving. ATLAS.TI web was used to support inductive coding and theme generation by isolating patterns in stated motivations of each publication. Coding focused on identifying patterns in the texts around authors' purposes and motivations that framed the piece of literature and the authors' use of terminology and/or conceptual framework that directed the literature.

Over two rounds of data charting, a total of 142 publications were reviewed (Table 1). The  Appendix provides citations for all 142 publications reviewed.

The most common type of publication in our dataset was journal articles (91/142), followed by conference proceedings (32/142). Combined, these two categories make up 87% of the publications reviewed and contain the bulk of the literature on the topic of personal archiving. A small number of edited book chapters (11/142), magazine articles (2/142) and grey literature sources such as blogs, reports and white papers (5/142) were captured by our data collection processes. Four full-length books and three theses/dissertations returned in the backward citation-chaining phase were excluded due to the volume of material required to process for data charting.

In analysing publication venues, we first sought to understand the most frequently occurring dissemination outlets and then the disciplines that these publications represent. Our dataset contained 70 distinct venues across several research areas including library and information studies, computer science, business, humanities, engineering and geography. Table 2 displays venues with four or more included items, grouping together venues whose names have changed over the years. While we did exclude full length books, the limited number captured indicates long-form publications are uncommon for dissemination of personal archiving research. Denoted by asterisk (*), 4/11 of these journals are aligned with the field of archival studies.

Next, we used WorldCat.org assigned United States Library of Congress (LOC) subject headings for each publication venue to code each item in the dataset by its main research area. Categorising publication venues by research area can be quite broad, particularly as existing discipline classification systems group subjects such as library science, archival studies and information science under the same heading. Use of WorldCat.org assigned LOC subject headings allowed us to capture a more granular understanding of journal subjects where personal archiving research is likely to be published. We coded the subject at the broadest level of the discipline and found use of 29 categories of subject headings (Table 3). Although the term “archives” was the most frequently coded subject heading, the range of subject headings used suggests that the term personal archiving is utilised by multiple disciplines. Many publications explored technical challenges faced by people when maintaining personal collections, reflecting an overarching theme of concern about the long-term access and curation implications of ubiquitous use of personal computers, social media and electronic devices that create records in digital formats.

To further understand the disciplinary perspectives represented in personal archiving research, we grouped related subject headings, which resulted in 10 combined subject headings (Table 4). The combined subject headings provide an overarching view of the distinct disciplines actively researching personal archiving. Archives, which included the subject heading of digital preservation, remains the most frequently used subject heading to describe publications venues in the dataset but a significant volume of personal archiving research also falls under the disciplinary umbrellas of computer science (including human-computer interaction), library science and information studies, respectively.

To better understand personal archiving as a research topic over time, we examined the year of publication of items in our dataset. While our initial search parameters retrieved literature published between January 1994 and January 2025, our backwards citation-chaining captured items stretching as far back as 1983. Analysis by publication year shows a peak in 2011 and 2014 and a noticeable declining trend since (Figure 1).

The earliest publications in the dataset were obtained through backwards citation chaining and were published between 1983 and 1993. Of the five items published during this time period, three-fifths were located in journals published by the Association for Computing Machinery and two were published in journals associated with the field of business. We searched for literature published between January 1994 and January 2025. In the first five-year period (1994–1999), nine items appeared in our dataset. Of the nine items, 5/9 appeared in archival studies journals (Archives and Manuscripts and Archival Issues). In the most recent five years of the dataset (2019–January 2025), 20 publications appeared. Of the 20, only two were published in archival studies journals (American Archivist and Archivaria), suggesting a decline in interest in the topic among archival studies scholars.

Authors were counted for each time their name appeared within the author field of an included publication regardless of whether they were first author or a co-author. A total of 215 unique author names were captured in our data collection process, with a total number of 289 author attributions. Of the 142 publications, 65 were solo-authored publications and 76 were authored by two or more unique individuals. Due to the large number of authors publishing on the topic of personal archiving, we report here authors of three or more dataset publications. An additional 25 individuals authored 2 publications in the dataset and 212 individuals authored one publication included in the dataset.

Authors appearing in Table 5 were more likely to have published in multi-authored works, which is more common in computing research. Marshall, Whittaker and Sellen are examples of authors who explore the technical dimensions of personal archiving rooted in human-computer interaction (HCI). Adrian Cunningham (ranked third) was the only solo author to appear in the table and also one of the few authors on the list aligned with archival studies research; most of this research discussed personal archiving in digital formats. This demonstrates that within the dataset, “personal archiving” was most commonly used in computing research.

In addition, we analysed affiliated institutions by sector. In cases of multi-authored work where the authors of a publication were affiliated with two or more sectors (e.g. a research department in a university and industry or a research department in a university and a library/archives), we coded those instances as cross-sector collaborations. Analysis revealed that authors affiliated with academic research units (schools, departments, labs, etc.) in universities (84/142) were the most active participants in dissemination, followed by authors based in archives or libraries (29/142), cross-sector collaborations (15/142), industry-based authors (11/142) and non-profit institutions (2/142). A closer look at the 15 publications authored by cross-sector collaborations revealed that collaboration between academic unit based authors and industry-based authors was the most common (10/142), followed by a collaboration between an academic unit and an archives/library (4/142) and a single collaboration between an archives/library and a non-profit (1/142).

Comparing the authors' sector against the years of publication provided another view of this data. Publications authored by those based in either archives/libraries or academic units remain steady between all years of the dataset (1983–2024). However, involvement of industry is far more varied, with the last publication by an author located in industry appearing in 2013 and the last involvement of industry in a cross-sector publication led by an academic unit in 2019. This suggests that industry-located authors' interest in the area of personal archiving significantly waned between 2019 and 2024.

In each publication, text that describes the authors' motivation(s) for conducting the research was analysed qualitatively to identify themes and patterns. These themes and patterns provide insight as to how authors position the phenomenon of making and keeping personal archives as relevant to their own research areas and associated disciplines and how the concept of making and keeping personal archives is problematised in research. After coding this text, the following themes were identified, that describe how authors position the making and keeping of personal archives in research publications: 1) personal archiving as an other; 2) personal archiving as sustaining the self 3) personal archiving as a means to acknowledge what has been overlooked. These themes are not mutually exclusive.

Most often, personal archiving is framed as an other that is distinct from practices performed by professional archivists, that takes places outside of or before a personal collection is ingested into an institutional archive. While not returned in our initial database search for publications when developing the dataset, Douglas and Mills (2018) similarly found that archival studies research has repeatedly “othered” personal records. Much of the discussion in the dataset literature focused on describing this activity as an other when compared with a norm, often implied to be order and organisation imposed by professional archivists via arrangement and description practices or order and organisation made available via commercial software solutions.

For example, Bass (2013) describes personal digital archives as “a wilderness” (p. 50), citing John et al.’s (2010) description of personal digital archives as “archives in the wild.” Dallas (2016) uses the phrase “beyond the wild frontier” to describe the custodial theorisation of digital curation, which includes issues associated with personal digital collections. Within our dataset, there exist descriptions of personal archives as “an enchanted wilderness” (Harris, 2001), “messy” (Speer and Jones, 2022), “scraps” (Berenstein et al., 2008), “out of control” (Ashmore et al., 2012) and something to be “tidied up” (Boardman and Sasse, 2024). These references contextualise the personal archives made and kept through the activity of personal archiving as a challenge in need of attention and/or a solution through language that suggests personal archives exist in a state of disorder. If the norm is organisation and order, personal archives made and kept by untrained individuals who engage in personal archiving are often placed in opposition to the norm.

In the dataset literature, when individuals make and keep disordered personal archives, solutions involve bringing physical and/or conceptual order and organisation to the disorder via tools, technologies, theories/concepts and/or the attention of a professional (tech developer, academic and/or archivist). Yet these proposed solutions inconsistently address why individuals make and keep personal archives to begin with. Why should lay individuals put forth effort to address the disordered state of their collections with use of a tool or by seeking the counsel of a professional? What is personal archiving for?

Dataset literature frequently justifies the purpose of making and keeping personal archives as reinforcing one's sense of identity and sense of self. In such a justification, personal archiving is portrayed as a form of practicing self-care and/or self-improvement: it can support work toward self-improvement goals through personal information management (MacKay, 1988; Sas and Whittaker, 2013; Van Kleek and O'hara, 2014) or “lifelogging” (Nicols and Cunningham, 2009). The process of making and keeping personal archives can also act as a form of self-care through self-reflection on one's sense of self (Cushing, 2013; Douglas, 2015; Hobbs, 2001; McKemmish, 1996). Personal archives that individuals make and keep provide evidence of one's identity, as “a personal digital archive may tell a story about a person's life, serving as a witness to one's memories” (Zhao et al., 2019). In this sense, personal archiving allows individuals to care for their public and private selves through what information they choose to trumpet about themselves and what information they want to remain more intimate.

Much of the dataset literature positions personal archiving worthy of study because it affords visibility of formerly invisible experiences and identities. This theme was relevant in discussions of enhancing visibility of marginalised groups, as well as highlighting an individual's personal identity. Amplifying the visibility of marginalised groups is a well-established theme in research about the value of community archives (Caswell, 2021; Flinn, 2007) and postmodern approaches to archival studies (Harris, 2002). In the personal archiving dataset literature, this theme was more likely to be present in research published in archival studies venues, in discussions of collections that begin when an individual makes and keeps personal archives and the collection is eventually accessioned into an archival institution.

McKemmish (1996) discusses personal archiving as a form of witnessing, suggesting it can address events and individuals that may go unnoticed. Hobbs (2001) describes how personal archives can provide “glimpses of the inner soul” of a record's creator (p. 126). In other literature, archivists express a motivation to draw attention to the often overlooked tasks associated with maintaining personal papers collections in institutional archive. This includes Cunnigham's (1994) pre-custodial intervention, the unique approaches to arranging and describing these collections (Hobbs, 2010) and donor relations (Becker and Noges, 2012; Douglas, 2015; Harris, 2012).

Another vein of literature seeks to explore how personal archives collections can act as a means to make marginalised groups who have traditionally been overlooked, more visible in society. Specific marginalised groups discussed in the dataset literature include prison inmates (Speer and Jones, 2022), LGBTQ individuals (Cooper, 2016), same sex parents (Cushing and Kerrigan, 2022) and women (Morris, 2023). Notably, Cooper and Speer & Jones discuss how the making and keeping of personal archives led to community archiving initiatives. Cooper details how BC Gay and Lesbian Archives founder Ron Hutton established his own collection and then began collecting material from the BC community. Speer and Jones state that the prison archive was “deemed too dangerous to be open to the public by university archivists” (p. 573) because the collection documents the brutality of the California State Corrections System. This statement aligns with Flinn's (2007) belief that community archives groups often mistrust mainstream archival institutions and professional archivists. Morris' collection of female music festivals was eventually accessioned into an institutional archive managed by professional archivists.

A subset of design-focused literature describes personal archiving as a neglected and burdensome activity for individuals. For example, Whittaker and Sidner (1996) discuss how important email messages can be “lost” or “overlooked” without filing behaviours, and Whittaker et al. (2010) report how individuals “lose” family photos because of poor recall. Jones et al. (2005) suggest that folders can “obscure” personal information despite supporting organisation. Trace and Zhang (2020) contextualise lifelogging as an attempt to gather fragmented data into a more tangible form from which formerly invisible insights about oneself can be derived.

While both orientations of personal archiving describe the phenomenon as traditionally overlooked for different reasons (related to marginalisation or loss, which triggers feelings of burden), the concept of personal archiving as a means to illuminate something or someone that was previously overlooked remains ubiquitous in the dataset literature.

We explored how dataset authors discussed their research approach and methods for studying personal archiving. Of the 142 sources reviewed, only 29/142 stated a clear use of a research method. While this number seems low, the dataset included literature from social science, STEM and humanities domain, each with different disciplinary norms for reporting on methods and procedures. Humanities literature is less likely to include a specific discussion about empirical research methods. Authors had a clear preference for qualitative methods in the dataset literature, with 23/29 of the articles that stated a scientific research method listed qualitative methods, 4/29 listed quantitative methods and 2/29 stated mixed methods approaches.

Specific data collection techniques used were more likely to be stated than authors labelling their data collection approach as qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. A total of 97/142 items in the dataset named the data collection method used in the research and several sources described using more than one data collection method. The scoping review captured nineteen unique data collection methods, with interviews being the most common data collection method used by authors (Table 6).

We also explored the analysis techniques dataset authors described. We thematically coded those data analysis techniques as either qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods to better understand the range of epistemic approaches currently being used in the field. Several publications did not disclose the use of analytical techniques (74/142), which was typical for non-empirical research articles as well as position papers that used existing literature to theorise personal archiving and propose avenues for future research. These items were coded as “not provided.” Of the 67/142 dataset items that disclosed analysis techniques, 46/67 were qualitative in nature, such as thematic coding, content analysis and grounded theory; 17/67 were quantitative in nature, such as utilising descriptive and inferential statistical techniques; and 4/67 were coded as mixed methods in nature, such as combined use of thematic analysis and statistical analysis techniques to profile users or evaluate tool performance.

This scoping review set out to analyse use of the term personal archiving in a corpus of research literature. Our objective was to identify who uses the term personal archiving and how they conceptualise it in research over time. We believe that this analysis provides novel insight into research about archives practice, which is largely performed by non-professionals, outside of the traditional realm of archival institutions.

Unsurprisingly, we found that the term personal archiving is more commonly used by researchers in computer science and technology design; this is evidenced by affiliations of the most frequently occurring authors in the dataset. An analysis of the dataset publications' dates provided useful insight about how use of the term broke down across disciplines. In the earliest five years of the time period that we searched (1993–1998), 4/8 publications were published in archival studies journals. In the latest years of the dataset (2019–2024), 2/23 publications were published in archival studies journals. This suggests that interest in personal archiving research originated in archival studies but has since increased and dispersed across several disciplines. Conversely, our analysis shows that personal archiving research published in archival studies journals has decreased in recent years. Future work can search the literature using the terms “personal” and “archives” instead of “personal” and “archiving” to verify whether more sources published in archival studies journals exist that were not captured by our search and inclusion procedures.

One perspective is that published research that uses the term personal archiving exists outside of the traditional scope of archival studies research. Our qualitative analysis of the dataset literature supports this perspective: in their discussions of personal archiving, Bass (2013) and Cunningham (1994) position personal archiving (verb) as “pre-custodial” or taking place before a personal collection enters an institutional archives. Cunningham (2011) advocates that professional archivists become involved in the records creation process as a part of reimagining the role of professional archivists in increasingly digital societies. Hobbs (2001) argues that the traditional archival studies practices developed to preserve and maintain government records need to evolve to suit the needs of the personal collections that professional archivists maintain. Yet these descriptions structure personal archiving activity in reference to a professional archivist's work practices, whereas computing and design-focused researchers rarely consider professional archivists’ practices while designing tools and techniques for maintaining personal collections outside of institutional settings (Cushing, 2010). We believe that archival studies researchers regard personal archiving research as distinct from the research concerns of archival studies as a broader field, which is more focused on “personal archives” in reference to the management of records collections in archival institutions, curated by professional archivists. In contrast, personal archiving research regularly positions the making and keeping of personal archives untethered from discussion of professional archivists' practices and jurisdictional control.

Considering this finding, a question remains: is this distinction worth revisiting? Writing from the archival studies perspective, Cunningham (2011) acknowledges that “ongoing technological transformation of personal information creation and management creates opportunities for ongoing reconceptualisation of notions of “the archive” and “archival endeavour” (pp. 82–83). As such, if personal archiving research falls outside of the primary interests of archival studies research, Cunningham (2011) questions whether this positioning is apposite. Future research could further explore the ways in which the making and keeping of archives outside of the traditional concepts of archival theory and practice has (or could) influence the archivist profession.

The finding that professional archivists regard personal archiving research as distinct from the research concerns of the broader archival studies field is reminiscent of early discussions had about the role of community archives within the archival sector. Despite initial resistance within the field, community archives research has had a growing influence on the archival studies sector in the past 2 decades (Caswell, 2021; Flinn, 2007). Initially, the existence of community archives was perceived as “challeng[ing] the legitimacy of the mainstream [archives] sector” by triggering questions on who has the authority to maintain archival collections (Flinn, 2007, p. 167). Flinn argues that the embrace of community archives initiatives can provide professional archivists with new outreach opportunities and insight into why some marginalised communities distrust mainstream archival institutions. As community archives research began to flourish, the archives sector began to evolve beyond the view of community archives as a challenge to the legitimacy of archivists' work and professional practice. This evolved perspective continues to adapt to better recognise and support community groups that seek to make and keep archives (Caswell, 2021).

Poole (2020) states that in their alternate approaches to collection, preservation and providing access, community archives have encouraged archivists to re-envision their roles as “guardians, elite experts, protectors and keepers to educators, mentors, facilitators, coaches, guides and collaborators” (Poole, 2020, p. 672). This embrace of community archives has also had an impact outside of archival studies: Jo and Gerbu (2020) suggest that archival studies, including their participation with community archives, can inform data collection practices in machine learning and further research on ethics, fairness and accountability in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Our dataset demonstrated that in some instances, personal archiving can lead to community archives initiatives (Cooper, 2016; Speer and Jones, 2022). Some authors have suggested that beyond providing evidence of creators' intent, personal archiving research could have a greater impact on the future of archives work.

Beyond supporting professional archivists to understand creators, personal archiving research affords a view of the future of archives work and how it may stretch the boundaries of what is considered the archival sector. However, for personal archiving research to have impact on the archival studies field, archivists must move beyond the position that personal archiving activity must be viewed through the lens of existing archival theory and practice.

Another question from finding that personal archiving research is distinct from personal archives research remains: what purpose does this distinction serve? We believe that drawing a distinction between personal archiving and personal archives acts as an attempt to preserve professional archivists' areas of expertise. We did not discover any dataset items that implicitly or explicitly aimed to threaten or supplant the legitimacy and social value of professional archivists. However, discussions of how personal archiving probes the boundaries of what is and is not considered archival practice can be interpreted as contributing to anxiety about the future role of professional archivists. Discussions of novel technology, most recently including artificial intelligence (AI), further contextualise this anxiety. In a position paper speculating on the future of the archivist profession in the age of AI, Theimer (2018) outlines a possible future for archival work including that “Employment and identification are not tied to physical materials or a physical location. New organizational models enable specialists to work across institutions” (p. 16). Understanding the making and keeping of personal archives has the potential to inform the future of archives work but this potential is limited when understanding of personal archiving is restricted as “pre-custodial activity” that informs traditional structures of appraisal, arrangement and description and documentation strategy of archival collections in the custody of institutions. Rather than treat personal archiving as a before or an other to professional archivists' work, approaching personal archiving as an alternate configuration of archival work has the potential to yield new insights for professional archivists' practices. For example, what might a personal archiving tool or technique look like, if it was jointly created by a tech designer and a professional archivist? This may contribute to new understandings of how archivists practice outreach. If personal archiving is often framed as a means to sustain the self, how might this inform concepts of organisation, digital access and supporting use?

We are not suggesting that the vision Theimer (2018) describes will or should become a reality. Rather, we suggest that an analysis of thirty years of research on personal archiving has provided insight about how the venues where personal archiving research is published contextualise how researchers approach personal archiving as a phenomenon. Industry-based and technology design researchers largely explore personal archiving as a phenomenon without situating it in relation to existing organisations of information work and the professionals who perform this work (archivists). Approaching personal archiving as an information practice performed by individuals (not professionals) afforded technology and design researchers the ability to contextualise personal archiving as a challenge to be addressed or a problem to be solved through their own disciplinary expertise. It introduced new research questions about why people are motivated to make and keep personal collections. This afforded the development of tech-driven solutions to these challenges and problems, and positioned the making and keeping of archives as an activity from which to derive profit through the sale of tech tools and systems, which Acker (2025) also found in her research. Our analysis provides support for this finding, in how research about the making and keeping of archives peaked in 2011 and 2014 when offsite digital storage become more readily available to individual consumers, paving the way for marketing tech solutions to individuals. Future studies can further explore the role of research in shifting understandings of who engages in and attempts to shape how and why the making and keeping of personal archives is problematised, and the ways in which industry-based authors contribute to conceptualisations of phenomenon as problems to be addressed via efficiency and profit-driven solutions.

In contrast, research published in archival studies publication venues approach personal archiving as a phenomenon to be situated within traditional organisations of archivists' work practices. The dataset authors publishing in archival studies venues acknowledge the value of personal archiving once it is contextualised within existing structures of professional archivists' work. This approach affords discussion about how personal archiving can inform how professional archivists' can maintain original order (Bass, 2013) or how archivists can advise individuals how to maintain personal collections (Condron, 2019). If the approach to understanding the making and keeping of personal archives by lay individuals is only positioned as having value once the activity is placed in the context of professional archivists' practices, archival studies as a broader field risks disregarding a source of information that may inform the future of what it means to perform archival work.

We suggest that understanding practices of making and keeping archives beyond how they can be integrated within existing organisations of archival theory and practice may yield novel insights for the future of the archivist profession. For example, personal archiving research about how and why individuals maintain personal collections (Cushing, 2013) may enhance understanding of access to and use of digital collections, particularly in consideration of recent questions from scholars about how professional archivists apply appraisal and digitisation to collections (Jaillant, 2022; Zaagsma, 2023). Understanding the role of identity in personal archiving has the potential to inform methods to minimise perceived misuse of digital collections (Cushing and Osti, 2023). If access to digital collections is reconceptualised as a desire for influence and oversight and distance afforded by offsite digital storage weakens these characteristics (Acker, 2025), then how can this reality drive discussions about how memory is preserved over time?

In undertaking a scoping review of personal archiving research, our goal was to understand how the practice of making and keeping archives removed from an archival institution could inform the future of archives work. Our findings suggest that analysing the who, why, where, when and how of personal archiving research is informative in this regard. For example, pinpointing the years at which personal archiving research piqued allowed us to consider what might have influenced this research at that time (ubiquity of cloud storage). Through our exploration of authors' associations and journal discipline, we were able to identify how different authors problematise personal archiving in their research aims and objectives. We found that research published in archival studies venues differed from research published in computing and design publication venues in how the phenomenon of personal archiving is problematised. This allowed us to suggest that the making and keeping of personal archives may inform the future of what it means to engage in archives work.

We also found that archival studies research was likely to position the making and keeping of personal archives as distinct from professional archivists’ practices and positioned the value of personal archiving as largely limited to providing detail about collections before they are accessioned into an archival institution. We believe that this othering is reminiscent of how the archival sector initially viewed community archiving as irrelevant to professional archivists practices (Flinn, 2007). Over time, community archives grew to be embraced by the archivist profession for how they could evolve archival theory and practice. We believe that the making and keeping of personal archives holds a similar potential to inform the future of what it means to engage in archival work, if the archival sector can reorient the commonly held assumption that the value of personal archiving is limited to providing information about a creator's intent.

If personal archiving research is in need of a future agenda, it is in relation to these findings: to conceptualise how the practice of making and keeping personal archives can contribute to future understanding of what it means to engage in and perform archival work, including who performs this work, where they perform it and why they perform it. Acker (2025) found that when archive became a verb, it opened the door to machines that could archive, which eventually created distance between individuals and data. It also allowed platforms to control what is accessible and inaccessible. Acker concludes with a call to arms to develop alternate forms of networking, in order to wrest control from these platforms.

Along this vein, personal archiving opens the door to lay individuals making and keeping archives, which affords alternate conceptualisations of authority, access and organisation in relation to archives, broadly conceived. With these alternate conceptualisations, an uncomfortable truth develops for professional archivists: the archival sector must consider that the preponderance of its conceptualisations of authority, access and the practice of arrangement and description as a form of organisation may diminish. These concepts could evolve with insight from existing and future research about how individuals make and keep archives but the archival sector would first need to embrace personal archiving research as valuable in its own right, without attempting to evaluate it through the lens of established archival theory and practice. We believe the archival sector's reorientation toward community archives can act as a guide in such an endeavour.

The authors thank Vanessa Reyes for participating in the pilot scoping review stage of this research project.