Family Archiving in the Digital Age

Family homes are replete with “stuff”—physical artifacts and collections of objects that say something about the people who live in that home, who they are, and what they are about. At the same time, increasingly, the stuff that we keep is digital, whether or not this is generated deliberately (as in photos and videos), or simply the result of our activities in the online world. This burgeoning archive of digital data offers up many new and challenging issues for how we create archives of value for ourselves, our families, and as a legacy in future. Further, there may be interesting new opportunities for combining digital data with physical objects to create new heterogeneous kinds of archives for the family. This chapter examines these issues drawing on existing research, and projects into the future through an exploration of new kinds of technologies to support archiving in the home of the future.