Module 4: Additional Resources & Donation of Personal Military Records
Upon completion of module 4, participants will be able to:
Locate specialized preservation resources. (CO 4)
Discuss the role of archives and museums in the long-term preservation of personal military records. (CO 4)
Identify regional and national archives and museums with military collections. (CO 4)
The last three modules introduced you to basic preservation concepts and skills. As you move forward with identifying your important personal records and starting to preserve them, you may need some additional resources to provide you with more information and suggestions for your specific situation. Additionally, you might eventually consider donating your materials to a local, regional or national cultural heritage institution. In our final module, we will highlight where you can find additional resources, discuss the role of archives and museums in long-term preservation, and discuss how you can identify regional and national cultural heritage institutions with military collections.
Locating Specialized Preservation Resources
As noted above, you may find yourself in need of additional information or resources as you move forward with preserving your records. The following section provides a select listing of useful organizations and resources with a brief description of each.
Professional Organizations
Many regional and national organizations provide guides, how-to videos, tutorials, and other types of training. Other organizations provide directories in case you need to locate a professional conservator for a specific item.
Society of American Archivists (SAA)
SSA is a vital community that promotes the value and diversity of archives and archivists and serves as the preeminent resource for the profession. Its vision is to empower archivists to achieve professional excellence and foster innovation to ensure the identification, preservation, understanding, and use of records of enduring value.
American Library Association (ALA)
The ALA promotes library service and librarianship. Its mission is to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.
The American Alliance of Museums’ mission is to champion equitable and impactful museums by connecting people, fostering learning and community, and nurturing museum excellence. One of its strategic priorities consists of enriching education systems, bolstering economies, strengthening the social fabric of communities, improving people's well-being, and beyond.
American Historical Association (AHA)
Founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies, the American Historical Association provides leadership for the discipline and promotes the critical role of historical thinking in public life. The Association defends academic freedom, develops professional standards, supports innovative scholarship and teaching, and helps to sustain and enhance the work of historians. As the largest membership association of professional historians in the world (over 11,500 members), the AHA serves historians in a wide variety of professions and represents every historical era and geographical area.
Books & Reports
The following books and reports may also provide you with additional information about how to manage and preserve your personal records. These books may be purchased from their publishers, local bookstores, or online vendors such as Amazon. You could also consider asking your local library reference desk if they could inter-library loan a copy of one.
BOOKS
M. Condron, Managing the Digital You: Where and How to Keep and Organize Your Digital Life. Lanham, Maryland: Roman & Littlefield, 2017.
Starting with a values assessment, this book helps readers identify what items are important to them personally so that they can effectively prioritize their time and effort. Covering multimedia, correspondence, legacy planning, password protection, photos, non-digital documents, financial and legal documents, and even social media archiving, this comprehensive text addresses how to get started and how to develop a plan for managing existing and future items.
B. H. Marshall, Ed., The Complete Guide to Personal Digital Archiving. Chicago, Illinois, USA: American Library Association, 2018.
Although meant for scholars and other professionals in preservation-related professions, this book will break down archival concepts and best practices and show how to work with personal digital archives. Whether it’s needing to cull your most important email correspondence or transferring home movies and photographs to more easily shared and mixed digital formats, this book will offer assistance.
M. Note, Creating Family Archives: A Step-by-Step Guide to Saving Your Memories for Future Generations. Chicago, Illinois, USA: Society of American Archivists, 2019.
Family history is important. Photos, videos, aged documents, and cherished papers—these are the memories that you want to save. And they need a better home than a cardboard box. Creating Family Archives is a book written by an archivist for you, your family, and your friends, taking you step-by-step through the process of arranging and preserving your own family archives. It’s the first book of its kind offered to the public by the Society of American Archivists.
Gathering up the boxes of photos and years of video is a big job. But this fascinating and instructional book will make it easier and—in the end—much better.
C. E. Lee, Ed., I Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era. Chicago, Illinois, USA: Society of American Archivists, 2011.
This edited volume explores issues, challenges, and opportunities in the management of personal digital collections, focusing primarily on born-digital materials generated and kept by individuals. The book is divided into three parts, each covering a different aspect of preserving personal digital archives: part 1 is devoted to conceptual foundations and motivations; part 2 focuses on particular types, genres, and forms of personal traces; areas of further study; and new opportunities for appraisal and collection; and finally, part 3 addresses strategies and practices of professionals who work in memory institutions.
REPORTS
M. Ashenfelder et al., “Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving,” Library of Congress, 2013.
Published by the Library of Congress (LC), “Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving” compiles a collection of 31 posts published in the LC official preservation blog, The Signal. The posts cover three themes: 1) guidance on preserving personal digital memories, 2) narratives about real-world encounters with personal digital preservation issues, and 3) descriptions of outreach on the part of the LC with institutions and individuals to promote personal digital archiving.
G. Redwine, “Personal Digital Archiving,” 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr15-01.
Published by the Digital Preservation Coalition, this report identifies, delineates, monitors, and addresses topics that have a major bearing on ensuring our collected digital memory will be available tomorrow. They provide an advanced introduction to support those charged with ensuring a robust digital memory, and they are of general interest to a wide and international audience with interests in computing, information management, collections management, and technology. The DPC is a nonprofit membership organization based in the UK. Its mission is to enable its members to deliver resilient long-term access to digital content and services, helping them to derive enduring value from digital assets and raising awareness of the strategic, cultural, and technological challenges they face.
Digital Preservation Handbook. Glasgow, Scotland, UK: Digital Preservation Coalition, 2015.
This handbook “is intended to provide guidance to institutions at international, national, regional and local levels who are involved in or contemplating creation and/or acquisition of digital materials. Within those institutions, the Handbook is aimed at both administrators and practitioners and is accordingly structured to include a mix of high-level strategic overviews and detailed guidance. In addition, the Handbook is aimed at service providers who may be in a position to provide all or part of the services needed to preserve digital materials. It is also relevant to funding agencies, who will need to be aware of the implications of the creation of digital materials. Finally, it will be of interest to data creators whose involvement in the preservation of their digital materials is still crucial, despite being restricted by the overarching business needs of their organization.”
S. Wingo, “Preserving Personal Digital Files: A University of Michigan Library Instructional Technology Workshop,” Ann Arbor, MI, 2012.
This report is designed as a companion workshop material to train librarians and library patrons on preserving personal digital files. It explains the importance of intentionally preserving digital materials, the basic steps in digital preservation, walkthrough guides on preserving popular file types (e.g., pdf, gif, jpg), strategies to create and maintain backups, and references to external resources.
Guides
The following online guides can also provide useful information for you.
S. Witmer, “Personal Digital Archiving Guide,” University of Michigan Library, 2020.
Witmer is a librarian at the University of Michigan. His guide helps patrons preserve their digital collections by following a five-step process: 1) selecting, 2) gathering, 3) organizing, 4) backing up, and 5) maintaining digital records. The guide defines important archival concepts such as born-digital information, digitization, or compression. It introduces readers to processes such as managing metadata and creating and maintaining backups, as well as offering specific steps to preserve non-streaming (e.g., text and images) and streaming (e.g., audio and video) materials. It also offers external references to books and reports on the subject of personal digital archiving.
“Personal Digital Archiving: The Basics,” Purdue University.
Created by Purdue University Library, this guide will walk you through the process of 1) identifying, 2) organizing, and 3) making copies of your materials. The research will offer you concrete steps to handle your digital photographs, your social media feeds (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), your web content (e.g., blog posts), emails (e.g., Gmail, Outlook), and streaming media (e.g., audio, video). Once your collection is compiled, the guide also walks you through steps to create backups and advises you on storage options and basic security measures to protect your information.
J. Swadosh, “Personal Digital Archiving: Digital Preservation Basics,” The New School, 2019.
Created by The New School, this guide focuses on helping you collect, create, and maintain digital media files so that they are accessible in the long term. The guide is structured along four steps: 1) identifying where your data is, 2) deciding which files are most important, 3) organizing and selecting such files, and 4) making copies and storing them in different places. If you decide to donate your files to an archive, the guide will guide you in preparing your collection for donation. You will also get advice on preserving specific types of records, such as audio and video, web content, and social media feeds. Finally, you can also learn how to prepare your files to donate to an archive.
Mills, K. Oldham, and C. Caust-Ellenbogen, “Personal Digital Archiving,” Tri College Libraries, 2019.
The TriCollege Library Research Guide on Personal Digital Archiving is designed to help you preserve your digital records. You will learn how to 1) identify where you have information, 2) decide what is worth keeping, 3) organize your records, 4) make copies, 5) understand the tradeoffs of distributing your data across various storage devices and cloud-based services, and 6) embed extractable metadata whenever possible. The guide offers concrete steps to keep email, digital photos, social media feeds, websites, and audio and video. The guide is based on instructional material from the Library of Congress and the Vassar Digital Library, a library from Vassar College in New York state.
“Personal Digital Archiving Train-the-Trainer Workshop: Additional Resources,” Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 2014.
Created by the Society of Georgia Archivists, this guide is structured in seven parts: 1) The What and the Why of Personal Digital Archiving, 2) The Landscape of Digital Records, 3) Best Practices for Creating Personal Digital Records, 4) Ownership and Copyright of Personal Digital Records, 5) Privacy and Security of Personal Digital Records, 6) Best Practices for Storing Personal Digital Records, 7) Best Practices for Access and Ongoing Management of Personal Digital Records, and 8) Best Practices for the Digital Afterlife. Each part is, in turn, a collection of web resources, from dictionary entries to blog posts to YouTube videos.
“Personal Digital Archiving: How to create a digital archive for your work, thesis, and career,” Maryland Institute College of Art, 2019.
Created by Cristina Fontanez-Rodriguez (2019), this guide explains the importance of digital preservation for students of art majors, the basic steps of digital preservation, considerations for documenting artwork, and recommended formats for long-term preservation. The guide also offers steps to submit thesis projects to the Library at Maryland Institute College of Art and further reading on digital preservation for artists.
E. Baucom, “Personal Digital Archiving,” Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, 2018.
Created by Erin Baucom, librarian at the University of Montana, this guide covers the five basic steps of digital preservation: 1) identifying what information you have, 2) organizing your content, 3) saving your files in preservation-recommended formats, 4) backing up your files, and 5) checking-on your files. The guide also advises on storage strategies and specific steps to preserve social media feeds and web content.
M. Peachy, “Personal Digital Archiving,” Tufts University.
Created by Margaret Peachy, librarian at Tufts University, this guide provides advice on personal digital archiving and recordkeeping. The guide covers basic steps on digital preservation, tips for setting up a collection, preservation-friendly file formats, and links to additional resources.
PROJECTS
Documenting the Now (aka DocNow) develops open-source tools, and community-centered practices that support the ethical collection, use, and preservation of publicly available content shared on the web and social media. DocNow currently advertises five preservation tools on its website: 1) DocNow, a tool for appraising, collecting, and gathering consent for Twitter content; 2) twarc, a command line tool and Python library for collecting tweet data from Twitter's official API; 3) Hydrator, a desktop application for turning Tweet ID datasets back into tweet data to use in your research; 4) Social Humans, a label system for social media content; and 5) The Catalog, a community-sourced clearinghouse for tweet identifier datasets.
YOUTUBE
“Team Digital Preservation,” Digital Preservation Europe Youtube Channel, 2013.
Created by Digital Preservation Europe, these 2D animated videos aim to humorously educate people about the basic concepts surrounding digital preservation.
“Digital Preservation,” North Carolina State Library Youtube Channel.
A series of short video tutorials by the North Carolina State Library. The videos cover specific topics such as file naming conventions, digital storage, and verifying the authenticity of digital files.
T. Webre and J. Sheldon, “Snow Byte & the Seven Formats: A Digital Preservation Fairy Tale,” Library of Congress, 2013.
This educational video by the Library of Congress is similar to those by Digital Preservation Europe. The video explains the problem of the obsolescence of digital information through a 2-D animated re-telling of the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.