Saving Your Digital Past, Present, and Future - by Vanessa Reyes (Paperback)

About the Book

An engaging resource written for anyone interested in learning how to save their personal digital information. The digital era has reshaped the nature, scope, and use of personal information. This book analyzes the concepts associated with preserving and managing personal digital information.

Book Synopsis

An engaging resource written for anyone interested in learning how to save their personal digital information. The digital era has reshaped the nature, scope, and use of personal information. This book analyzes the concepts associated with preserving and managing personal digital information.

Review Quotes

It's stunning how much research Vanessa Reyes has done on every aspect of managing personal digital information. In exhaustive detail, she explores methods of PDI organization and maintenance and offers strategies for ongoing PDI management. Geared toward general audiences and information professionals alike.

Most of us live digital lives of abundance, creating and keeping evermore stuff. Vanessa Reyes has written a wonderfully practical and prescriptive guide for inventorying your personal digital belongings, organizing them, and keeping them safe without becoming a hoarder or minimalist. She explores the reaches of the question: not just saving, but also loss, intentional deletion, identity management, and digital estate planning. Reyes has written a book for everyone who wants to gain control of their digital legacy.

With the overload of digital information, strategies for managing our personal information are continuously evolving. Do we keep or throw away newly encountered information? If we keep it, how should we organize it? And when the information is needed, do we have a known way to retrieve it? In this book, Dr. Reyes provides an account of various practices for managing our personal information. She describes, in very accessible language, some of the tradeoffs of managing our personal information. She describes common tools, practices, and conventions used to manage our information. In my experience, the best strategy to manage your information is always tailored to the particular details of your personal information space. In this book, Reyes provides the basics on how to begin to create such a personalized information management strategy.

About the Author

Dr. Vanessa Reyes is an Instructor in the School of Information at The University of South Florida. Prior to working as an Instructor, she was an adjunct faculty member at the Simmons College School of Library & Information Science. She received her Ph.D. in 2016 from Simmons SLIS and holds an M.S. in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University. Reyes' work in public libraries, and special collections and archives inspired her to pursue research in preservation, digital libraries, and archives. Reyes works closely on research that analyzes personal digital collections, to understand how they are created, managed, and made accessible. She is also interested in how students and professors use personal digital information. Her current research contributes to the emerging field of personal information management (PIM), quantifying how individual users are organizing, managing, and preserving digital information.