The Complete Guide to Personal Digital Archiving

Brianna H. Marshall

• Publisher: ALA Editions
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780838916056
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838916827
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

PART I

Learning about Personal Digital Archives Best Practices

SARAH SEVERSON

1

Archiving Digital Photographs

OVER THE COURSE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, photography established itself as a ubiquitous technology in our daily lives. From the introduction of the Kodak Brownie camera in 1900 to the invention of the instant Polaroid cameras of the 1970s, and then the introduction of digital cameras in the 1990s, photography in all its forms has become one of the most popular ways to document our everyday personal histories. Now, thanks to the rising popularity of cell phone cameras, more and more people have a camera with them wherever they go, dramatically increasing the number of photographs we take. A study by InfoTrends projects that the number of photographs taken in a year will reach 1.3 trillion in 2017.1

With numbers like these, there is a real concern about how we’re going to manage and save all of these images for the future. Vint Cerf, chief evangelist at Google, warns of a potential digital dark age,2 a future where it will be difficult to read historical electronic media because they were left in obsolete or obscure file formats. The sheer amount of photographs now being produced makes older print-based archival practices, like hand-selecting or keeping everything, impractical. Digital collections are increasingly easy to lose, compared to their analog counterparts. A single computer failure can wipe out an entire digital photograph collection, destroying years of a family’s carefully curated memories. There is also the very real danger of accidents happening when migrating data from an old computer to a new one. Another practical concern is how easy it is to lose context for what is shown in photographs: now that we can no longer sit down and write on the back of a photo, it’s harder to keep valuable contextual information associated with a photograph. Finally, even with precautions taken against all these hazards, there is still the risk of hardware obsolescence making a digital collection inaccessible in only ten or twenty years, let alone a hundred years.

THE ROLE OF THE INFORMATIONAL PROFESSIONAL

The Library of Congress reports that questions about archiving personal photograph collections are among the most frequent questions they receive.3 This demonstrates that people are aware of the urgent need for archival work, and they want to be more involved in archiving their own digital collections. There are also amateur and professional photography communities that have a vested interest in managing and preserving their photograph collections. They have collectively created an extensive body of literature documenting their work to that end. These range from personal websites with extensive blog posts detailing personal systems to the American Society of Media Photographers’ Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow, an initiative funded by the Library of Congress.

As such, it’s important that the library and archives community knows how to support personal digital archiving processes, and also that we share this knowledge with the general public. The nature of library and archival work equips us professionals with unique perspectives and insights into the preservation of electronic records. It is important that we share this knowledge to raise awareness of the importance of preservation and, hopefully, help more people to start their own personal digital archives before so much material accumulates that they are overwhelmed by the task.

Simple steps can be taken to help people adopt practices that will help them to better manage their own digital archives. The most important thing in archiving digital photographs is developing a workflow that addresses the capture, organizing, and storing of photographs. This chapter will look at best practices in personal photo archiving, as well as tools and processes which can be used and implemented to assist in archiving personal digital photograph collections. It is intended as a primer for librarians and archivists to assist their user communities in these tasks.

COMMON TERMS

• JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) was a file format developed in the 1980s to handle color digital images, and it is the most common format you’ll encounter. JPEG2000 (JP2, JPF, JPX) is a newer (introduced in 2000) version of JPEG which includes a lossless setting.
• TIFF (Tag Image File Format) is the U.S. Library of Congress’s digital preservation standard.
• RAW file formats, such as CRW, CR2, .NEF and DNG, preserve the original raw sensor data captured by the camera.
• Technical metadata refers to the information that is automatically recorded in the file by the camera or scanner, such as the height and width of the image, color space, and image compression. Technical metadata is recorded using the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF), which was launched to encourage interoperability between devices and is now recognized as a de facto standard for technical metadata. It is supported by the majority of leading camera manufacturers.
• Descriptive metadata is information that describes the image and is used for discovery and identification. Most descriptive metadata has to be manually inputted using a photo management system. Ideally, descriptive metadata will provide a sense of context, such as who created the image, when and where it was taken, and why. It might even describe the content, like the people or subject matter represented in the image. Essentially, it’s very similar to the explanatory notes we used to write on the back of photographs, and it can be useful for easily finding and retrieving specific images.
• Embedded metadata refers to descriptive metadata that has been embedded using the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) metadata schema and is persistently linked to an image.
• Digital asset management (DAM) comprises robust image management systems that allow you to store, organize, search, view, and usually process digital photographs.
• Cloud-based photo management and/or storage systems allow you to use photo management processes, such as organizing, searching, and editing photographs, through a web-based application. The files are hosted in the cloud, not stored locally. Examples include Dropbox, Google Drive, or Flickr.

HOW TO ARCHIVE DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS

Planning: What Are You Going to Keep?

The first step in helping someone to set up an archival process starts earlier than most people imagine—it is important to start by understanding what is going to be archived. Knowing what they are going to keep, and for what reasons, will help people to decide what the most appropriate method is for archiving their collection. With digital photographs, you will need to help people identify exactly what kinds of images are in their collections and what the patron wants to be able do with them in the future.

Questions you can ask patrons include:

• ▪ Are they pictures they took themselves?
• ▪ Are they photographs they were sent, or photographs they’ve digitized?
• ▪ Do they want to be able to search and find photographs from specific events?
• ▪ Are they planning on passing the photographic collection on to family or friends for safekeeping, or do they want to share them right away?
• ▪ Are they planning on leaving the collection to an institutional archive?

Starting from an understanding of each of these basic uses is important. The process of patrons thinking through what they want to do with their archive will help to create an archival process that is best suited to their needs and capabilities.

The final step in planning is to make sure patrons have the best-quality photographs possible. It is difficult to predict what uses will be made of the photographs over a fifty-year time frame, and getting the highest-quality images at the start of the process, when the picture is first taken, can only help future access and long-term preservation. This means taking photographs at the highest resolution possible and choosing the best file format.

What Is the Best File Format?

For preservation purposes, you will want to recommend the use of file formats that have the best chance of being readable in the future. To ensure this, the structure and nature of the format should be openly documented and supported by multiple applications. The three most commonly used file formats are JPEG, TIFF, and RAW, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages.

For most personal archives, a JPEG file will be the best preservation file format. It’s the most common format that is captured by cameras4 and is openly documented. It’s a relatively lightweight file size, meaning that less storage space is required for archiving images in this format. The major disadvantage to this format is that JPEG uses lossy data compression, meaning it reduces the file size of an image by merging similar or “redundant” pixels, so less information is kept overall. For most people and most uses, however, this is not a significant issue. However, JPEG2000, which is a newer version of JPEG, is not widely supported or used. This makes it a poor choice for preservation.

While TIFF is a proprietary file format, it is well documented and broadly supported. It is a lossless image format, and a good choice for people who are looking to preserve the highest possible image quality. The major disadvantage of this format is that TIFFs generally result in very large file sizes for only a small gain in image quality. It is therefore the best choice for professionals, but not necessarily for the rest of us.

RAW file formats can be compared to a digital negative, since they contain all the information used to render a digital image. Working with RAW files is more difficult—they are read-only files that require additional software to access and edit. With the exception of DNG, they are all proprietary formats that are specific to certain camera models; DNG is openly documented and supported by Adobe. In almost all cases, RAW files are not appropriate for personal photographic archives. They should only be used in the rare cases where there is a need to make substantial edits in the future that require all of the information captured in this format.

Consolidating: Where Are All the Photographs?

Before creating an archive with someone, it is important to gather all their photographs into one place. When working with people, you will likely find that this is the first big hurdle you encounter, but it can be overcome with careful planning.

First, identify all the image sources being used. This includes all the devices that both they and their families are using to take photographs, such as cell phones and cameras, and also any printed photographs that they have already or will be scanning. When it comes to cell phones, it is important to understand where photographs are stored in order to ensure they are all transferred. The camera function inside an application, such as Facebook or Instagram, for example, may not store photographs in the same place as the native camera appli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Putting Personal Digital Archives in Context
• Part I | Learning about Personal DigitaL Archives Best Practices
• Part II | Personal Digital Archives and Public and Community Audiences
• Part III | Personal DigitaL Archives and Academic Audiences
• Part IV | Social and Ethical Implications of Personal Digital Archives
• About the Contributors
• Index