Two fundamental digital preservation strategies are refreshment and migration. These strategies are designed to preserve the integrity of digital items and to enable you to retrieve, display, and use them despite changing technology.

An acute preservation challenge lies in saving digital items. Technology enables us to create, use, and be enriched by information in ways that were unthinkable generations ago. But the same advances that make sharing information so easy also pose some problems. The complexity and diversity of technology is overwhelming, even as storage capacity becomes cheaper. The volume of digital data, unstable storage media, and obsolete hardware and software make the usability of digital items a challenge.

If you are the keeper of family history items that you believe could be of interest to scholars, you may wish to donate them to an institution where they will be archived and available for others to use.

As you reflect on your life, what moments or thoughts would you like to save? What about some of your family members? Wouldn’t you like to record their opinions on their lives?

Open-ending questions about people’s life experiences yield surprising results. Use these questions to record your thoughts, or start a conversation with a relative. When possible, record the interview on audio or video.