Digitalization of Personal Archives: What Should Historians and Archivists Be Ready For?

Traditionally, it seemed to be a must for a historian to address personal archival funds of academicians when researching the history of science and education. Today, the situation is changing. Archives still acquire such funds, accumulating digital traces of the professional and personal lives of the academic community. Moreover, the materials of these funds are becoming more numerous and diverse. However, under the influence of the open data policy, a great part of records that used to be stored in personal archival funds can now be freely accessed online. Prospects for the long-term preservation of personal digital materials are unclear, and their value is not obvious even for their creators. In these circumstances, a question arises: will it be possible and necessary to preserve personal digital archives of academicians in memory preservation institutions, or are the archival and scientific community about to see this tradition end? This article aims to identify the main features of personal digital archives of academicians and their potential as primary sources. To reach this aim, we need to complete the following tasks. Firstly, it is necessary to describe the content of a personal digital archive of a scientist or a university instructor and to identify what makes it different from a traditional personal fund. Secondly, we need to understand what changes should happen in scientific tools and techniques to allow the researcher to use the information potential of these records to the fullest. Finally, we will try to answer the question: is it possible to transfer personal digital archives to memory institutions without losing their informational potential? To collect the empirical data for this research, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 candidates and 26 doctors of sciences from the universities and research institutes located in Tomsk. The interview data show that both traditional and digital archives of the interviewees have a core that remains stable, but the digital turn changes the nature of some documents. Some new types of records emerge as well. Historians and archivists need to be aware of and consider the specific features of digital materials to preserve and use them effectively. Among these features are the following: technologies make digital objects multi-layered; any digital object is re-constructed with every opening to be presented in a human-readable form in a certain software; metadata are essential; borders of digital records are hard to mark. At this point, we have to admit that personal digital archives reveal their full potential only when stored “in the wild”. But this way, they cannot be accessed by researchers. For that reason, a collaborative work of historians and archivists on experimental transferring of personal digital records to archives becomes very important. It will help to understand what must be preserved and stored in the archive and how it can be done in a way that personal digital archives keep most of their information potential.

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