IWR were approached this week by a Research Fellow at UCL. He is looking for some volunteers (academics in particular but professional groups in general) to complete an online questionnaire about the kind of information management behaviours they adopt in personal life. The purpose is to ask what this might mean for the digital curation practice.

As information professionals, do you follow the same rigorous practices of filing and cataloguing at home? Is the filing of family photos on your hard-drive done with the same zeal as you would be with work material? Is your MP3 music-library properly catalogued and referenced, not only by artist, title and date, but also by mood, every category religiously filled in? Do you back up everything both on a spare storage device as well as online – just in case?

The questionnaire project, Digital Lives, is being run in partnership with the British Library and Bristol University. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and isn’t too taxing.

Below is the official message and link to the survey.

Digital Lives: Helping People to Capture and Secure their Individual Memories, their Personal Creativity, their Shared Historic Moments

Increasingly, our family memories, our personal achievements, our experiences of historical events, are being facilitated and recorded digitally.

Digital Lives is a pathfinding research project that is setting out to understand how individuals retain and manage their personal collections of computerised information  - everything from digital photographs and videos to favourite podcasts and sentimental email messages - and how these digital collections can best be captured in the first place and preserved in the long term, perhaps for family history, biographical or other purposes.

The project is led by Dr Jeremy Leighton John and colleagues at the British Library who, together with experts from UCL and Bristol University, are researching the challenges that lie ahead as more and more of our memories and documentary witnesses exist in electronic form.

We would like to invite you to take part in our research by completing an online survey.  This should take no more than ten minutes of your time and it will provide us with crucial information that will benefit both individuals such as yourself, in your day to day management and storage of information, and also help the work of the British Library and other archives enormously as we plan for what is fast becoming a largely digital world.

If you would like to take part in the survey, please click here: http://tinyurl.com/5wtwgm

If you would like to enter our Prize Draw and stand a chance of winning £200 in British Library gift vouchers (drawn at random and with no further obligation) you can register your interest at the end of the survey.

Please note that all responses are strictly confidential.  No individuals will be named when we report our findings, and the information collected will only be presented in an aggregated form.  You will not be contacted again as a result of completing this survey.

If you have any questions, or are concerned about the bona fides of this survey, please email Principal Investigator, Dr Ian Rowlands (UCL School of Library, Archive & Information Studies)at: i.rowlands@ucl.ac.uk  (Digital Lives is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council:
Grant number BLRC 8669).