Traditionally professional approaches to the management of archives and records have differentiated between organisational/institutional/“official” records and personal and manuscript collections with thinking about the former being significantly more influential in the development of archives and records management practice generally. This book clearly attempts to redress the balance a little, locating the challenges of capturing, preserving and managing personal digital collections within a longer tradition of approaches to the management records and archives created and held by individuals. Opportunities for a democratising practice which give more voice to the individual (and to a wider range of individuals) within an otherwise overwhelmingly institutional and organisational focus of the majority of archival collections underpins some of the calls for greater interest in the personal but it is not only this impulse which motivates interest and concern – indeed many of the personal digital records collected will continue to be from the same elite groups who already find their ways into our repositories. A more significant point may be that the boundaries between business or institutional and individual records are more blurred and permeable than ever before with personal records being created within organisational contexts, and organisational records being created and stored in a range of personal digital environments. One writer here goes as far as to suggest that “with the breakdown of corporate/organisational controls on the information flows and information management patterns of individual staff members, the making and keeping of government and corporate information assets is increasingly coming to resemble the anarchic, heterogeneous and idiosyncratic recordkeeping behaviours of private individuals” (Cunningham, 81). Though many institutions are seeking to hold in check some of this idiosyncrasy, the main thrust of the point and its implications for all our interest in understanding how to better manage personal recordkeeping is persuasive.
As a number of research projects including the UK‐based Paradigm and Digital Lives in the past decade have recognised, the significance of personal collections is nothing new but the growth of such collections and the work of identifying and managing such collections in a digital and particularly online world is challenging and possibly urgent if many of these traces are not to be lost. Crucially as well as drawing upon the recordkeeping literature and practice, the editor makes the case for examining the insights of human‐computer interaction, personal information management (PIM) and digital forensics. These are approaches which have many similar interests and objects but there has been little previous exchange in terms of knowledge and expertise. At the heart of I, Digital there is a commitment to what the editor calls “concerted boundary spanning” (p. 5), although this boundary spanning is most evident and successful in those chapters in which the editor's authorial hand is present. Many of the other chapters remain primarily located within an archives and records discourse.
It is also important to be clear, as is the editor, what this volume is not about – personal records can be taken to mean both those records created and held by individuals and those records created and held by a range of institutions relating to individuals (employees, citizens, consumers). The extent of the challenges of these latter records, particularly in a digital world where the amount of personal data created and maintained has led to much well‐founded concerns about surveillance, privacy and data protection, are well explored elsewhere and do not really fall within the remit of this book, except in Sue McKemmish's chapter and elsewhere in passing.
Whilst published by the Society of American Archivists and presumably with an US audience primarily in mind, this is a refreshingly international book – at least as far as the English‐speaking world is concerned with contributions from the US, Australia, and the UK. However and as in much of archives and records management research and literature, the English speaker reader is left wondering what thinking there might be on these issues elsewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. As indicated above there is also a pleasing range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds, with contributions from archival and digital curation researchers and educators (Lee, McKemmish, Onuf and Spurgin), HCI and PIM specialists (Capra), academic librarians and archivists (Hyry, Thomas), those working in state and national institutions (Cunningham, Johnston), and the private sector (Marshall). These contributions are organised into three sections: Conceptual foundations (Lee and Capra, Cunningham, Marshall and McKemmish), Genres and document types (Spurgin on photographs, Lee on challenges of applying traditional archival appraisal methods to the social web) and applications and approaches within different institutions (Onuf and Hyry, Johnston and Thomas). These different sections will attract different readers as well as those who wish to read all the way through.
A number of chapters are worthy of particular mention. The contribution by Lee and Capra “exploring the connections” between PIM and archives and records management by comparing the core concepts of each approach to personal digital collections, concludes that despite (because of?) the permeability of the organisational/personal boundary PIM has much to offer in the context of the identification and location of personal collections whilst recordkeeping can offer useful awareness when providing the information and context necessary for long‐term stewardship for future and on‐going secondary use. Cathy Marshall, a senior researcher at Microsoft describes the sheer size of the change in the creation of digital personal material and individual behaviour with regards to their personal data since 1995 and then examines adaptive strategies for capturing and preserving the enormous diversity and dispersement of the collections which result from such behaviour. Her conclusions about what can and cannot be expected of personal creators in terms of their own personal digital records management approaches is limited and realistic and suggests that a distributed “benign neglect” may be the best that can be offered to those materials of medium to low value.
Personal recordkeeping and personal digital archiving is certainly an area where applied research whether in a professional location or carried out within a higher education context is absolutely necessary and potentially extremely important. The chapters by Kristina Spurgin and Susan Thomas provide valuable and interesting accounts of their research in personal recordkeeping behaviour. Spurgin's preliminary account of her research into the digital personal information management practices of “serious” leisure practitioners, in this case amateur photographers, suggests that where the record creators place a very high value on the materials they are creating they often develop and adopt highly sophisticated systems for the management and preservation of those materials. Despite this sophistication, Spurgin also identifies a number of areas in which cultural heritage and recordkeeping professionals could support this community and other serious leisure practitioners to manage their personally and socially valuable digital collections. Thomas (Digital Archivist at the Bodleian Library) summarises the Paradigm and Cairo research projects on the capture and curation of digital collections (including personal collections) and then describes the implementation and application of the findings of those projects at the Bodleian as part of the futureArch scheme and the establishment of Bodleian Electronic Archives and Manuscripts (BEAM) repository. Although acknowledging the importance of a more pro‐active and early approach towards personal collections, Thomas notes that the records professionals must continue to be able to deal with many collections “acquired through more reactive, opportunistic means” and the challenges they bring for many years to come.
Different readers will have different interests but as someone responsible for the education of new entrants into the archives and record management profession I was particularly interested in reading the chapters from Adrian Cunningham and Sue McKemmish, both of whom had written influential and at that time fairly isolated articles in the 1990s on the significance and management of personal records. Cunningham notes that personal recordkeeping technologies and behaviour are “ever‐ evolving, heterogeneous and unpredictable” (80), and so suggests that rather than concentrating on practical technical solutions that it is worth exploring the recordkeeping principles and possible “reconceptualisations of notions of ‘the archive’ and archival endeavour” (83) which ought to inform any considered response. His subsequent examination of the ICA's Principles and Functional Requirements for Records in Electronic Office Environments amended to be relevant to the personal recordkeeping context is a useful starting point but perhaps not the reconceptualisation that he suggested was also necessary. Like Marshall, Cunningham acknowledges the greater responsibility that individuals with have to have for their own recordkeeping practices but also advocates greater intervention in the record creation process by recordkeepers.
Sue McKemmish updates her seminal 1996 Archives and Manuscripts article “Evidence of Me” for a digital age and in particular examining the potentially far‐reaching impact of new collaborative and social technologies on personal recordkeeping, perhaps even reconciling different and apparently “incommensurate” knowledge systems, and what it means to be a recordkeeping professional in the context of the intersections and fuzzy boundaries between personal and public recordkeeping. McKemmish identifies personal recordkeeping within a records continuum perspective as a form of witnessing and memorialisation that is both individual and social (evidence of me and evidence of us) and asks with reference to some contemporary and innovative projects in Australia and South Africa how transformed recordkeeping professionals and institutions can collaborate with individuals, communities and organisations to effectively share control of the “recordkeeping and archival spacetimes of the future” (134).
So who will benefit from this book – clearly it has a wide intended audience, including recordkeeping educators and students, a range of professional groups with responsibility for collecting and managing personal digital collections, curators of more specialist and specific materials (such as photographs) and perhaps even those who wish to better capture and understand their own digital traces. As is often the case with a volume of edited contributions, different chapters will appeal to different audiences and the tendency might be to dip in and out rather than reading straight through. Whilst understandable such an approach would undervalue a book which stakes out an important, yet consistently under‐written and under‐researched area of recordkeeping thinking and practice, and presents some of the key thinking and applications of that thinking from the 1990s and first ten years of the twenty‐first century. There is some unevenness in the extent to which the writers are willing to embrace contemporary developments in personal digital collections and look to the future, and some of this thinking and practice will inevitably become out‐dated and be left behind as society dives further into the social web leaving increasingly detailed but mediated and often contradictory digital traces of our lives in numerous walled online environments. The book does not provide all the answers to the challenges of personal collections in the digital era, and given the complexity and heterogeneity of these challenges some of the thoughts offered by different authors are contradictory, nevertheless this volume remains an excellent starting point to understand where we have been and from which to consider where we are going.
