Using the papers of contemporary British politicians as a testbed for the preservation of digital personal archives

Paradigm (Personal ARchives Accessible in DIGital Media) is an exemplar project to explore how archivists might select, acquire, process, store, preserve and provide access to the digital archives of individuals for the use of future researchers. Using the papers of contemporary British politicians as a testbed, the project team will evaluate existing and emerging theoretical and practical work in the fields of archival science and digital curation. We intend to learn from both disciplines and apply this knowledge to our exemplar scenario with the goal of striking a balance between theoretical principles and practical procedures. This article places the Paradigm project in the broader framework of digital preservation initiatives in the UK and abroad, introduces the key aims of Paradigm and outlines some of our initial findings. We also confront the implications of exponential growth in the creation of personal digital collections—from digital images, and music files to personal websites and blogs—and conclude with a discussion of what this means for the wider archival profession. 1 [1] Many technical aspects of digital preservation have been omitted from this article for reasons of space and because we were just beginning our practical explorations in these areas at the time of writing. We hope to publish a second article towards the end of the Paradigm project which will offer critiques of the OAIS reference model, the METS and PREMIS metadata standards, the Fedora and DSpace digital repository software, as well as other tools, software and standards tested by the project team. A follow-up article would also give a detailed evaluation of the practical lessons learnt by the Paradigm project.