Saving Your Digital Past, Present, and Future

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.