title: We are all Archivists: Encouraging Personal Digital Archiving and Citizen Archiving on a Community Scale
creators: Leslie Johnston
abstract: The more we interact online and manage digital lives, the more we build a born-digital record of our personal contexts and interests. There is a clear mandate that libraries, archives and museums must assume responsibility for educating the public about strategies for personal digital archiving and personal curation, and for exploring new approaches to processing, preservation, and access. Personal digital items initially have value to the individuals who generated them, but once those items are transferred to a collecting institution they will have a collective value to society. We also have a less well-established mandate to work with those citizen archivists who are taking the initiative to save large collections of digital ephemera and the at-risk output of underserved communities. Large amounts or small, all digital materials have the potential to be vital to cultural history studies in the future.
keywords: singapore personal digital archiving citizen archiving web archiving digital preservation