Talk given at the BOBCATSSS 2015 conference - http://www.bobcatsss2015.com/. Personal archiving is an important part of the concept of personal information management, which implies acquiring, organizing, using and preserving information for personal use. Personal digital archiving is a corollary of interacting with digital content making it a crucial issue in today’s information society. In this paper, this issue is observed from the point of view of the students of information sciences, who are at the forefront of the development of information society. The purpose of this research, conducted in three Croatian universities offering courses in information science, is to establish how aware the students of information science are of the importance of this issue, to determine the digital archiving practices they employ and to examine what other factors influence this activity (such as education level and gender).

1. Exploring the methods and practises of
personal digital information archiving
among the student population
Hana Marčetić
Under mentorship of Maja Krtalić, PhD, assistant professor
Department of Information Sciences
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Osijek, Croatia

2. Personal digital archiving (PDA)
• implies acquiring, organizing, using and preserving information
for personal use
• generation C – content accumulation
• the prevailing belief that problems will resolve themselves in
time
• keeping and leaving methods
• fragmentation of methods
• multiple approaches and management practices
The only way of preserving digital information is actively engaging
in its preservation!

3. Personal digital information archiving among
the information science student population
• conducted in three Croatian universities offering courses
in information science (Universities of Osijek, Zagreb
and Zadar)
• practices and opinions of information science students
explored via an online questionairre
• answers to following questions
– are future information experts aware of the problems of personal
digital archiving?
– what actions do they engage in trying to preserve their digital
artifacts?
– do they feel the amount of content weighing down on them?

4. Findings
• high level of awareness of the importance of PDA and
the effort put into it (over 90%)
• the factor of importance – selection criteria?
• continuity
• information fatigue

5. Migration and data management
• migration
– lower levels of awareness regarding neccessity and importance
– I don’t practice it although I think I should vs anything can be
found on the Internet
• backup
• organizing practices
– folders – by date, type, importance, content, alphabetically
– separation methods
– adding metadata
– tools as strategy (Marshall)

6. • format choice
• deleting objects that are no longer needed
• social networks in PDA and organizing
practices

7. The way the nature of an object influences student practices

8. • Main conclusions regarding
– gender
– awareness of PDA issues gained in class
– education level
– university attended

9. “Digital archiving often reflects analogue archiving habits
and depends on how organized a person is in their
everyday life“
“Google disk rocks!”
“The biggest problem is archiving a lot of passwords and
the user accounts they belong to, especially if you're
prone to a bit of paranoia.”
“Storage limits in cloud services (as one of the options
available for storing personal digital content)”
“I think digital objects are extremely difficult to preserve
because the platforms themselves are relatively
unstable, so I find it difficult to choose one, or decide on
the number of copies.”

10. Thank you!