A collage featuring various overlapping images and textures, including a close-up of a human eye, hands handling archival materials, a person sitting in water, vintage books, a computer file folder icon, flowers, clouds, and a grid sketch of a building. Repeated words "More" appear on the left, while years from 2004 to 2022 are listed vertically in the center. The composition uses muted tones with occasional pastel highlights—blue, purple, yellow, and olive green—and is overlaid with torn paper and photographic effects.

In today’s world, each moment generates a digital trace. Between the photos we take, the texts we send, and the troves of cloud-stored documents, we create and accumulate more digital matter each day. As individuals, we hold immense archives on our personal devices, and yet we rarely pause to ask: What of this is worth keeping? And for how long? Each text we send, document we save, or photo we upload quietly accumulates in the digital margins of our daily routines. Almost always, we intend to return to these traces later. Almost never do we actually return to them.

Libraries do not collect and store everything indiscriminately. They are bastions of selection, context, and care. So why don’t we do the same when managing our personal digital archives? How can library principles inform personal archiving practices when memory becomes too cheap, too easy, and too abundant to manage? What does meaningful digital curation look like in an age of “infinite” storage and imperfect memory? How might we better navigate the tension between memory and forgetting in the digital age? At LIL, we’re interested in holding space for these tensions and exploring the kinds of tools and frameworks that help communities navigate these questions with nuance, care, and creativity. We researched and explored what it could look like to provide individuals with new kinds of tools and frameworks that support a more intentional relationship with their digital traces. What emerged is less a single solution and more a provocation about curation, temporality, and what it means to invite forgetting as part of designing for memory.

This blog post sketches some of our ideas and questions informed by the work of archivists, librarians, researchers, coders, and artists alike. It is an invitation to rethink what it means to curate the digital residue of our everyday lives. Everyone, even those outside of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), should engage in memory work with their own personal digital archives. How might we help people rigorously think through the nature of digital curation, even if they aren’t already thinking of themselves as archivists or librarians of their personal collections? We hope what follows offers a glimpse into our thinking-in-progress and sparks broader conversation about what communities and individuals should do with the sprawling, often incoherent archives our digital lives leave behind.

Our premise: overaccumulation and underconsideration

We live in a time of radical abundance when it comes to digital storage. Cloud platforms promise virtually unlimited space. A single smartphone can hold thousands of photos. Machines never forget (at least, not by default) and so we hold on to everything “just in case,” unsure when or why we might need it. Often, we believe we are preserving things such as emails, messages, and files, because we’re simply not deleting them.

But this archive is oddly inhospitable. It’s difficult to find things we didn’t intentionally label or remember existed. Search functions help us find known items, but struggle with the forgotten. Search is great for pinpointing known things like names or keywords, but lost among our buried folders and data dumps are materials we didn’t deliberately catalog for the long-term (like screenshots in your photos app). One distinction that emerged in our work is the difference between long-term access and discovery or searchability. You might have full-text search capability over an inbox or drive, but without memory of what you’re looking for or why it mattered, it won’t appear. Similarly, even when content resurfaces through algorithmic recommendation, it often lacks appropriate context.

And so, we are both overwhelmed and forgetful. We save too much, but know too little about what we’ve saved. Digital infrastructure has trained many of us to believe that “saving” is synonymous with “remembering,” but this is a design fiction. People commonly assume that “they can keep track of everything,” “they can recognize the good stuff,” and most of all, “they’re going to remember what they have!” But in practice, these assumptions rarely hold true. The more we accumulate, the less we can truly remember. Not because the memories aren’t saved, but because they are fundamentally disconnected from context.

A library lens on everyday personal digital archives

“Not everything that is dead is meant to be alive.”

When it comes to our digital lives, we often feel pressure to rescue every bit of data from entropy. But what if some data is just refuse, never meant to be remembered? In libraries and archives, we don’t retain every book, document, or scrap of marginalia. We acquire with purpose, discard items and weed our collections with care, organize our collections, and provide access with users in mind. Digitally, this process can be much harder to implement because of the sheer volume of material. Everything is captured whether it be texts, searches, or half-finished notes. Some of it may be precious, some useful, and some exploitable.

The challenge is thus cultural as much as technical. What deserves preservation? Whose job is it to decide? And how can we create tools that align with people’s values, rather than simply saving everything? Libraries and archives are built on principles of deliberate acquisition, thoughtful organization, and selective retention. What if we followed those same principles in our personal digital ecosystems? Can we apply principles like curation, appraisal, and mindful stewardship from library science to personal digital archives? What if, instead of saving everything permanently by default, we adopted a mode of selective preservation rooted in intention, context, and care?

Integral to memory work is appraisal, deciding what is worth keeping. In archival theory, this is a complex, value-laden practice. As the Society of American Archivists (SAA) notes, archivists sometimes use the term “enduring value” rather than “permanent value” with intention, signaling that value may persist for a long time, but not necessarily forever. Notions of “enduring value” can shift over time and vary in different communities.

On forgetting (and why it’s valuable)

 In digital systems, forgetting often has to be engineered. Systems are designed to store and resurface, not to decay. But decay, entropy, and obsolescence are part of the natural order of memory. If we accept that not everything needs to be held forever, we move into the realm of intentional digital gardening.

“What if forever isn’t the goal? What’s the appropriate level of preservation for a given context?”

Preservation need not be permanent in all cases. It can be revisited, adjusted, revised with time as people, contexts, and values change. Our tools should reflect that. What if temporary preservation was the more appropriate goal? What if the idea of a time capsule was not just about novelty and re-surfacing memory, but instead core to a practice of sustainable personal archiving, where materials are sealed for a time, viewed in context, then allowed to disappear?

“The memory needs to be preserved, not necessarily the artifact.”

There’s a growing recognition in library and archival science that resurfacing content too easily, and out of context, can be damaging, especially in an era where AI searches can retrieve texts without context. Personal curation tools should assist in the caretaking of memory, not replace it with AI. Too often, we see narratives that frame technology as a substitute for curation. “Don’t worry about organizing,” we’re told, “We’ll resurface what you’ll want to remember.” But this erases the intentionality fundamental to memory-making. Sometimes, forgetting protects. Sometimes, remembering requires stewardship, not just storage.

Designing for memory: limits as creative force

Designing for memory is ultimately a human-centered challenge. Limitations can be a tool, not a hindrance, and constraints can cultivate new values, behaviors, and practices that prioritize deliberate choice and intentional engagement.

Imagine creating a digital time capsule designed for memory re-encountering, temporality, and impermanence. You can only choose 10 personal items to encapsulate for future reflection. What would you choose? What story would those items tell? Would they speak to your accomplishments? Your values? Your curiosities? Would they evoke joy or loss?

Capsules could be shaped around reflective prompts to aid selection and curation:

  • What story or feeling do you want to preserve? What emotional tone does this capsule carry: celebration, remembrance, grief, joy?
  • Who is your audience: your future self, family, a future researcher, a larger community?
  • What context needs to be retained for future understanding?
  • What kind of media captures this best: text, photo, audio, video, artifacts? Why did you choose what you did?
  • What items would you miss the most if digital platforms went down or the items became unavailable? (Make a list).
  • Should these items be available immediately, or unlocked after a certain amount of time?
  • Once opened, should the capsule remain accessible, or eventually disappear?

Engaging in reflection like this can help individuals perform the difficult and deeply human work of curating your personal digital archive without being overwhelmed by the totality of your digital footprint. Making this kind of digital housekeeping part of your established maintenance routine (like spring cleaning) helps make memory work an intentional and active process that encourages curation, self-reflection, and aids the process of choosing what not to keep. It is memory with intention.

Memory craft: a call to action

In every era, humans have sought ways to preserve what’s vital, and let the nonessential fall away. In our current digital context, that task has become harder, not because of lack of space, but because of lack of frameworks. Your life doesn’t have to be backed up in its entirety. It only needs to be honored in its essentials. Sometimes, that means creating a space in which to remember. Sometimes, that means creating a ritual in which to let go.

At the Library Innovation Lab, we are continuing to explore what it means to help people preserve with intention. Becoming active memory stewards means moving beyond default accumulation and choosing with care and creativity what stories and traces to carry forward. We want to make memory, not just data, something people can shape and steward over time. Not everything needs to be preserved forever, and our work is to provide people with the frameworks and tools to make these decisions.

Resources

The following resources helped shape our thinking and approach to intentional curation of personal archives in the digital age:

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues Clare Stanton, Ben Steinberg, Aristana Scourtas, and Christian Smith for the ideas that emerged from our conversations together.

Visual by Jacob Rhoades.