![]() People don't realize it until they lose things." But when my daughter's hard drive crashed, she lost all the baby pictures of her second child. "I have boxes of family photos from the 1800s. People think digital media will always be there-but that's not necessarily the case," she continues. "When I present, I always ask people, how many of you have lost files? Everyone has. "Content is vulnerable whenever you change computers or update software," she says. "All of us have content that's vulnerable to destruction or loss, and we want to prevent that," says Mary Molinaro, director of the Research Data Center at the University of Kentucky Library and a leading educator with the Library of Congress's Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program. Managing and preserving all this digital media presents tremendous challenges, not just for libraries and educational institutions seeking to archive their collections for future generations, but for those of us who want to store our personal photos, videos and. Technology's only getting smaller, and while it will be possible to view your favorite pics on your smartwatch in the next few years, we can't imagine it being quite the same. Good luck finding a player for the mixtape your 8th-grade crush made you. We take it on faith that our smartphones will always be able to display JPG images, that the "cloud" in which we've stored all our music and photos will always be there. Even in this digital age, people still want the physical manifestations of those JPG, MP3 and PDF files. While digital book sales continue to grow, that growth is slowing, and 80% of all books purchased are still in paperback or hardcover form. ![]() It also probably isn't a coincidence that vinyl records are enjoying newfound popularity among audiophiles who want a more authentic listening experience than what they get from iTunes. Inexpensive digital cameras made it easy for us to take lots of photos indiscriminately, but then we opted to print and save the best ones in keepsake books. Once all our vacation snapshots were invisible to us-stored inside our point-and-shoots or on tiny little storage cards-we felt like somehow we were losing those memories. It probably isn't a coincidence that scrapbooking as a hobby for home crafters really took off just as digital cameras did in the early 2000s. If you're a Millennial, you probably have a whole Instagram feed of selfies and photos of what you ate for dinner. If you're a GenXer, perhaps you have beautifully embellished scrapbooks of snapshots from memorable family activities and milestones, plus every photo you've taken since you got your first iPhone stored (and ignored) on your desktop computer. ![]() If you're a Baby Boomer, you probably have boxes in the attic full of dime-store 3-by-5 prints in their original envelopes, strips of negatives in the little pocket in front. Where are they stored? And more importantly, how? Your answer likely depends on your demographic cohort. ![]() Think about all the photographs in your possession. ![]()
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