Gordon Bell and MyLifeBits

About

The advent of personal computing devices such as PCs and smart phones with terabyte storage has enable the capture, recording and recall of everything a person reads, writes and hears. These are the new records and artifacts of the 21st century digital person. Since 1998 Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research has worked on MyLifeBits, a system to digitally store everything in a person's life, including accumulated and current articles, books, correspondence, financial and legal records, memorabilia, photos, telephone calls, time-lapse photos, video and web pages. MyLifeBits is both an experiment in lifetime storage and a software research effort. For archivists, exponentially increasing amounts of personal digital artifacts will soon arrive seeking immortality at the portals of museums and libraries, providing a new challenge to institutions accustomed to dealing with an analog person's boxes of papers and memorabilia of past millennia. Organizing, retrieving, preserving and protecting these fleeting, bit-based artifacts over the long-term is the contemporary archivist's greatest challenge. Bell's talk touched on the project's history and discussed the research challenges and the wide-ranging social and personal benefits of the MyLifeBits technology, especially as it pertains to cultural memory institutions.

Archive

Library of Congress, in Library of Congress: talks and concerts

Licence or status

Rights statement at the Library of Congress, as the Library of Congress states it.

Credit

Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

Who can watch

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