List of objects for homemade digital preservation

Homemade digital preservation is a term that I've invented myself. Some scholarly articles say personal digital preservation. In any case is digital preservation applied to our personal digital objects.

All of us know what digital preservation is as a way to preserve digital objects over time on the long-term, we have to decide whether we want to make homade digital preservation. This means preserve digital objects at home.

Many of us need to do digital preservation at home. We can not go to a great public institution, do not have specialized staff (well I do, but not everyone is, so take profit of it), money is often a problem and the time too. 

So, after all of these inconvinients, can we work on digital preservation at home? It is sure that most part of this technique depends on our purchasing power, but prior to know what we would need at home to digitally preserve things, ask yourself what you want to keep or you want to apply digital preservation of your personal documents. 

Here is a list of possible objects that you may have at home:

• Pictures in paper format
• Negatives of photographs
• Slides. There are various sizes depending on the year they were done.

Paper documents:

• personal letters
• charts
• postcards
• poems,
• business letters
• official letters
• various family documents
• stamps,
• kitchen recetes
• tickets to the football games
• tickets museums of your tours
• travel brochures
• airline tickets
• official documents as passports,
• ration cards
• bus tickets
• metro tickets
• attractions tickets (Mary goes round, bumpers...) 
• Opera tickets .... the list is endless

Graphic information

• Beta format video clips
• VHS
• movies on super 8
• 35mm
• betacam

Digital Documents

• documents written in Word
• Wordperfect
• WordStar,
• Documents created in old computers such Amstrad 64, Amstrad 128, Spectrum, Atari computers
• Powerpoint documents
• spreadsheets Qpro, 
• 1-2-3 spreadsheets
• dBase
• Access
• Digital pictures
• Digital video (there are different formats, discussed in later post), 
• Autocad documents
• E-mail in many programs: Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail,  Hotmail, Yahoo
• images and videos from you social networks accounts

Did I miss something?

send it to me or make a comment and we will add it to the list.

Information in physical support:

• External hard disks,
• computer hard disk from old computer that are away
• CD
• 5 "1/4 Floppy
• 2" 1/2
• Data tapes
• ZIP drives, 
• Some old computer with an unknown operating system 

This is a list of what we would have to preserve at home. 

First of all, organize your list and plan what you wants to keep.

In the next post we go through all these topics, I'll describe possibilities, review products, technical issues that we will gradually learn. 

Enjoy it!

Is digital preservation for anyone?

I think so. The answer to this question is difficult because in our case requires investing some money in our digital heritage.
It is true that digital preservation is related to computers, librarians, archivist plenty of technical vocabulary as metadata, obsolescence, digital video, digital photography, digital formats and other words that often are hard to understand. But if you follow this blog you could obtain clues and tricks to survive and to have your own digital archive.
Clearly, we have much work to do. Our letters, our videos, our photos, our books. Lots of things to preserver in our digital live. 
It's probably that if you look for on the internet you'll find another blog from me talking about digital preservation and digital curation. It's true there is another blog but is not updated as this one is going to be.




I leave you with a video of the Library of Congress. Enjoy it.