Managing Our Digital Footprint

By Cynthia Price, professional development chair

“On the Internet we are all hoarders.”

That point was shared in a CNN articleand told to VPC members by Crista LaPrade, digital asset management and preservation administrator at the University of Richmond’s Boatwright Memorial Library.

“Digital was supposed to make our lives easier and eliminate paper,” LaPrade said. “But digital allows us to keep everything.”

We are inundated with digital content and many people simply try to collect and keep everything, or at least as much as possible. “This is not sustainable,” she said as audience members nodded in agreement, eagerly waiting to learn how to organize their lives.

LaPrade, though, did not have easy answers. She said it would require work. “Consider what is important to you to archive,” she said. “The first step is determining what is valuable to you individually.”

Whatever you determine to archive, you should have a minimum of at least two copies. “Having a single copy of anything digital is never a good thing,” she said.

LaPrade modified tidying guru Marie Kondo’s rules to get started. They include: 

• Commit yourself to [digital archiving] tidying up.
• Imagine your ideal lifestyle.
• Ask yourself, is it is valuable or does it spark joy?
• Finish discarding first. Before getting rid of items, sincerely thank each item for serving its purpose. [Once you determine value, you can delete what is not important.]
• Tidy by category, not location. [Even with digital content it helps to group like things with like things first.]
• Follow the right order.

Identifying where all of your digital content lives is the first step. Content could be on old phones, jump drives, and multiple email accounts to name a few.

Once you have gathered your content, you can begin organizing it. LaPrade recommends file names that are descriptive and creating a directory/folder structure that makes sense to you. She also recommends creating a document that contains a brief summary of the directory structure and its files in case you forget. She said this also is helpful for estate planning.

Next you should make copies and manage them in different places. “You should store copies in different locations that are as physically far apart as practical,” she said. “If disaster strikes one location, the other copy of your important content would be safe.”

She also recommends checking your saved files at least once a year to make sure you can read them. Every five years, she suggests creating new media copies to avoid data loss.