Exploring the methods and practises of personal digital information archiving among the student population

The issue of personal archiving is one often raised in the context of the fast changing digital era. Even among the “informationally literate” personal digital archiving is more often simply a side-effect of generating content in the digital environment than a planned activity. The aim of this paper is to research the extent to which the student population employs the doctrines of digital curation, digital preservation and digital stewardship. This group is interesting for examining in this context because of the unique mixture of formal, mainly scholarly, and personal information that they govern in their day to day activities and in digital formats. Some of the information that this research attempted to obtain concerned the actions individuals undertake to acquire, store and conserve digital objects, the formats they use and the practices they employ in the process. An attempt was made to determine whether the migration of content is practiced, where and how digital information is stored, as well as whether or not scholarly objects (such as those used for study) are handled differently than informal ones (such as those used for entertainment and other private purposes). The paper also provides insight into student practices regarding the creation of digital copies of objects and the use of other media such as portable memory sticks, CDs, DVDs and Blue-Ray discs. The research touches on a number of other questions, such as: how often do students revisit the contents once they’ve created them? Do they use digital archiving in the cloud? Do they create backups for the objects they have identified as important to preserve? This paper also contributes to identifying the specific criteria for the selection of digital information that will remain preserved for the future other than pure chance. The survey was conducted on undergraduate and graduate information science students from the Universities of Osijek, Zagreb and Zadar. Online questionnaire sent to said institutions and dispatched among information science students resulted in data that can be used in attempts to answer the above mentioned questions. Once the survey was closed, the gathered data was analysed using SPSS programme and used to draw conclusions regarding personal digital archiving practices and awareness among this population, along with other interesting findings this study brought up.

Hana Marčetić

Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department of Information Sciences
Trg Svetog Trojstva 3
HR-31000 Osijek
Croatia

Revised version of paper that was presented on BOBCATSSS conference 2015.