# Gordon Bell and MyLifeBits

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.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2010
- By: Library Of Congress
- Genres: Science
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2021688449/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/2021688449?play=1)