Abstract: The internet has steadily become integrated with our everyday lives, and it is scarcely worth remarking that the quotidian footprint we leave is increasingly digital. This being the case, the question of what will happen to our digital legacy when we die is an increasing important one. Digital accounts containing emails, photos, videos, music collections, documents of all kinds, social media content, eBooks and the like, all trace the life we have led, and if they are to be conserved and bequeathed, if family and friends are to benefit from this often highly emotive and evocative desiderata, if history is to be recorded, we need to prepare these accounts and assets for the inevitability of death. A difficulty though, is that the demands of curating such a legacy are formidable, the importance of creating digital archives from personal data contained in online accounts is not well-established in the public arena, and the products and services available to facilitate this are largely inadequate. Future generations and future historians are the poorer for this. In this presentation we will point out some of the difficulties involved in curating and bequeathing a digital legacy, and suggest a partial remediation.
Our paper from CIRN Prato, 2013 is now available (Link)
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