As you know from reading one of my recent posts (you did, didn’t you?), I was on vacation in Boston for several days this month. A daughter was taking the Five Week Summer Program at the Berklee College of Music. We arrived in time to see her performance near the end of the program before collecting her belongings later in the week and bringing her home.
I tell you this only to explain why I was walking around with over $1,500 worth of digital hardware on my person. And most of the time it was invisible. I had my iPhone in one pocket, a digital camera in another, and a compact digital camcorder in another (they make them small these days). Then I had my iPad behind my back, under my shirt, tucked under my belt. I was packing serious digital heat. And yet each of those devices served a specific purpose and I used them all at least once — and usually often, but individually — throughout the day.
Some of those uses were for information gathering (e.g., looking up a web site), some were transactional in nature (e.g., making dinner reservations or buying tickets), and others related to communication (e.g., phone calls). But then another major use was collection building — taking photographs and videos.
Most of us have growing digital collections of stuff that we collect and try to manage — often clumsily and lazily. But collect we do. And increasingly we will be challenged to manage our digital collections with any semblance of effectiveness.
Those who use Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos may have a slight leg up on the rest of us, since at least they have their content backed up, and possibly tagged and loosely organized. The rest of us likely have a pile of bits, loosely organized by iPhoto or some other personal computer application. And if we aren’t backing those files up on either another hard drive or web services like Mozy, then we’re living on the edge.
Those of us who are librarians may be better at dealing with our own personal collections of digital files, but I wouldn’t bet on it. What’s that saying about the cobbler’s children?
For my part, I’ve begun a discipline that I’ve carried on for the last few years of taking the best of my digital photos (the non-family ones) and putting them up on my own photos web site, with structured metadata. This doesn’t cover the family photos, or the videos, but at least the best of my other work is organized and saved in a place other than my own hard drive. I also have various backups.
As time goes on, and we all collect more digital stuff than lackadaisical organizing techniques can handle, we’ll need better tools at hand. How about an iPhoto that compares your photographs to others on the web and suggests descriptive terms, or even automatically assigns them? It’s quite likely that your photo of Notre Dame, for example, is quite similar to someone else’s.
That’s just one idea, and it will be interesting to see what software companies do to help us with our growing personal collections of digital stuff. We in digital libraries might see some things we can learn from, and use.
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