Video: Digitally Storing Everything in Your Life: Gordon Bell and the MyLifeBits Project
Since we've publishing ResourceShelf, we've mentioned Microsoft's Gordon Bell many times. Bell is attempting to capture his entire life digitally. The project is called MyLifeBits and it began in 1998.
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.
Before working at Microsoft Bell worked for 23 years at Digital Equipment. He is an founding member of The Computer Museum and in 2003 became a fellow of the museum.
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