Saving Your Digital Past, Present, and Future: A Step-by-Step Guide

About the Book

A concise guide to managing your digital life.

Today, we collect and store an ever-increasing volume of digital personal information on convenient portable devices and create substantial amounts of personal textual and visual digital information on their personal computers. We have become accustomed to using a variety of tools that involve interactive social activities. Because of social media, there is a large amount of user-generated content related to all aspects of our lives and there is no way for creators to save it all and invaluable content ranging from personal notes to photos to medical information may be lost. Because we may lose so much information, it is helpful to find out as much as we can about how we can manage our personal digital information.

This book is a primer to preventing that loss. Here is an introduction to Personal Information Management (PIM) intended for a lay audience. The basic premise is that everyone needs to manage their digital information. This book introduces readers to the kinds of tools people most commonly use today. It will also consider the pros and cons of each of these tools. This book cover he concepts associated with preserving and managing personal digital information. Visual and textual examples illustrate how to use best practices to ensure the longevity of information, while considering current solutions to the problems associated with personal information loss.

The book is a detailed guide to the steps involved in managing information and images of all kinds:

Receiving Generating KeepingUsingOrganizingRe-findingSharing.
Most of us don’t know how to prevent information loss; this book introduces tools that will ensure the longevity of our digital lives.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: From Past to Present

Chapter 2: PIM Process

Chapter 3: Changing Our PIM Behaviors

Chapter 4: Loss of Our Personal Digital Collections

Chapter 5: DIY PIM Tools of the Future

Chapter 6: How Do We Save It All? Resources and Solutions

Chapter 7: Maintain Your Digital Life While Planning Your Digital Estate

Appendix (Recourses)

About the Author :
Dr. Vanessa Reyes is an Instructor in the School of Information at The University of South Florida. Prior to working as an Instructor, she was an adjunct faculty member at the Simmons College School of Library & Information Science. She received her Ph.D. in 2016 from Simmons SLIS and holds an M.S. in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University. Reyes’ work in public libraries, and special collections and archives inspired her to pursue research in preservation, digital libraries, and archives. Reyes works closely on research that analyzes personal digital collections, to understand how they are created, managed, and made accessible. She is also interested in how students and professors use personal digital information. Her current research contributes to the emerging field of personal information management (PIM), quantifying how individual users are organizing, managing, and preserving digital information.

Review :
Most of us live digital lives of abundance, creating and keeping evermore stuff. Vanessa Reyes has written a wonderfully practical and prescriptive guide for inventorying your personal digital belongings, organizing them, and keeping them safe without becoming a hoarder or minimalist. She explores the reaches of the question: not just saving, but also loss, intentional deletion, identity management, and digital estate planning. Reyes has written a book for everyone who wants to gain control of their digital legacy. With the overload of digital information, strategies for managing our personal information are continuously evolving. Do we keep or throw away newly encountered information? If we keep it, how should we organize it? And when the information is needed, do we have a known way to retrieve it? In this book, Dr. Reyes provides an account of various practices for managing our personal information. She describes, in very accessible language, some of the tradeoffs of managing our personal information. She describes common tools, practices, and conventions used to manage our information. In my experience, the best strategy to manage your information is always tailored to the particular details of your personal information space. In this book, Reyes provides the basics on how to begin to create such a personalized information management strategy. It’s stunning how much research Vanessa Reyes has done on every aspect of managing personal digital information. In exhaustive detail, she explores methods of PDI organization and maintenance and offers strategies for ongoing PDI management. Geared toward general audiences and information professionals alike.