Digital Lives: helping people to capture and secure their
individual memories, their personal creativity, their shared historic
moments.
Increasingly, our family memories, our personal achievements, our
experiences of historical events, are being facilitated and recorded
digitally.
Digital Lives is a pathfinding research project that is setting
out to understand how individuals retain and manage their personal
collections of computerised information - everything from digital
photographs and videos to favourite podcasts and sentimental email
messages - and how these digital collections can best be captured
in the first place and preserved in the long term, perhaps for family
history, biographical or other purposes.
The project is led by Dr Jeremy Leighton John and colleagues at
the British Library who, together with experts from University College
London and University of Bristol, are researching the challenges
that lie ahead as more and more of our memories and documentary
witnesses exist in electronic form.
(1) Survey
We invite you to take part in our research by completing an online
survey. This should take no more than 10 minutes of your time and
it will provide us with crucial information that will benefit the
work of the British Library and other archives enormously as we
plan for what is fast becoming a largely digital world.
Take part in the survey now!
If you would like to enter our Prize Draw and stand a chance of
winning £200 in British Library gift vouchers (drawn at random
and with no further obligation) you can register your interest at
the end of the survey.
Please note that all responses are strictly confidential. No individuals
will be named when we report our findings, and the information collected
will only be presented in an aggregated form. You will not be contacted
again as a result of completing this survey.
If you have any questions, or are concerned about the bona fides
of this survey, please email Dr
Ian Rowlands at University College London.
(2) Listing
Another key part of the research project is the compilation of a
list of technologies and online services that are either being used
widely or have the potential and promise to be useful to individuals
wishing to capture, share and archive their digital lives. You can
contribute to this research by emailing
us at Digital Lives and highlighting relevant products and services.
Digital Lives is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research
Council: Grant number BLRC 8669.
