Archiving Should Be Like Spring Cleaning

People still write. For a growing number, many of those personal thoughts and musings now are being documented in the digital world thanks to blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. Twitter reported a staggering 327,452 Tweets per minute on election night.

Statements online about the weather, children, the election and lunch become public immediately, as opposed to the handwritten diary a family descendant may discover and read decades later. Are the quick digital tidbits worth less, or do they have authentic meaning because they reflect true feelings at that particular moment; sentiments that may not be documented anywhere else? Sure, there is quite a bit of nonsense on the Internet, but there also is thoughtful and thought-provoking prose online. Actually, self-expression has always included the tedious and the sublime, dating back to cave drawings.

While it is prudent to think twice before publicly posting about a weekend in Las Vegas, you can still record the event with a good old-fashioned journal. My 8-year-old twin boys even started their own handwritten diaries after being inspired by the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. Will this habit stick for years to come? It is hard to say, but the analog and digital worlds can still exist together.

Social media platforms are providing the electronic version of a journal for many. The challenges of preserving these new “diaries” are more complicated though. Binary code can be quite fragile -- subject to data corruption, accidental or intentional deletion, backup failures, third-party restrictions and so on.

All hope is not lost though. People are becoming aware of the importance of personal digital preservation thanks to events like the Smithsonian Ask an Archivist question-and-answer sessions on Facebook and the Library of Congress's outreach efforts for personal digital archiving. Facebook offers an option to download personal accounts and Twitter plans to have personal archiving available soon .

To make this a success though, a time commitment is required. Consider having a regular personal digital archiving day just like spring cleaning. It should involve making copies on multiple storage devices and making sure files can open or be saved into other accessible file formats. It will pay off.

Join Room for Debate on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.