Personal digital records are one of the most underrepresented areas of archival theory and practice. Documentary forms created by private persons have long been victim of a poverty of professional attention, and much of the literature on the appraisal and preservation of records has tended to focus on those generated by government and other organizational entities. And strategies developed for the archival management of digital records have similarly placed strong emphasis on business functions or corporate transactions as the primary unit of analysis. This scholastic deficit has severely impaired the ability of the archivist to comprehend and effectively meet the many challenges of archiving personal records in the digital age. This thesis demonstrates how investigations of the original context of creation and use of records in contemporary personal computing environments are integral to the development of comprehensive strategies for the capture and preservation of personal digital archives. It is within these digital domains that archivists come to see cultures of personal recordkeeping, private appraisal decisions based on unique designations of value, and the complexities of both online and offline personal digital preservation strategies. A keen understanding of how individuals create and preserve their digital records across time and space should be of the utmost importance to archivists for, if nothing else, these pre-custodial activities are the principal sites of archival provenance. Chapter one discusses past and present responses to both paper-based and electronic personal archives. The discussion begins with the definition of the personal record as essentially non-archival by early leading archival theorists and how these definitions, though first advanced in the early to mid-twentieth century, continue to find resonance in contemporary archival ideas and institutional mandates. This chapter then illustrates how ideas predicated on the management of electronic government records, and metadata standards developed for formalized electronic recordkeeping systems, are not easily transposed to personal domains. Chapter two takes a critical look at the often oversimplified personal digital archiving environment to expose the many nuances in the context of creation and use of records by individuals in the digital era. Chapter three explores a number of emerging approaches to the professional archiving of personal digital records and reveals how the proper management of these materials requires multiple hardware and software applications, concise acquisition strategies and preservation methodologies, and diligent front-end work to ensure personal digital records cross the threshold of archival repositories. The thesis concludes with a summary of the main arguments and collates the best ideas, approaches, and technologies reviewed throughout to propose a hypothetical strategy for archiving personal digital records in the present. This thesis argues that significantly more work with records creators earlier in the record creation process must be done when archiving personal digital records because more proactive measures are required to capture and preserve these materials than was previously the case with paper-based or analog documentary forms.

Personal digital records are one of the most underrepresented areas of archival theory and practice. Documentary forms created by private persons have long been victim of a poverty of professional attention, and much of the literature on the appraisal and preservation of records has tended to focus on those generated by government and other organizational entities. And strategies developed for the archival management of digital records have similarly placed strong emphasis on business functions or corporate transactions as the primary unit of analysis. This scholastic deficit has severely impaired the ability of the archivist to comprehend and effectively meet the many challenges of archiving personal records in the digital age. This thesis demonstrates how investigations of the original context of creation and use of records in contemporary personal computing environments are integral to the development of comprehensive strategies for the capture and preservation of personal digital archives. It is within these digital domains that archivists come to see cultures of personal recordkeeping, private appraisal decisions based on unique designations of value, and the complexities of both online and offline personal digital preservation strategies. A keen understanding of how individuals create and preserve their digital records across time and space should be of the utmost importance to archivists for, if nothing else, these pre-custodial activities are the principal sites of archival provenance. Chapter one discusses past and present responses to both paper-based and electronic personal archives. The discussion begins with the definition of the personal record as essentially non-archival by early leading archival theorists and how these definitions, though first advanced in the early to mid-twentieth century, continue to find resonance in contemporary archival ideas and institutional mandates. This chapter then illustrates how ideas predicated on the management of electronic government records, and metadata standards developed for formalized electronic recordkeeping systems, are not easily transposed to personal domains. Chapter two takes a critical look at the often oversimplified personal digital archiving environment to expose the many nuances in the context of creation and use of records by individuals in the digital era. Chapter three explores a number of emerging approaches to the professional archiving of personal digital records and reveals how the proper management of these materials requires multiple hardware and software applications, concise acquisition strategies and preservation methodologies, and diligent front-end work to ensure personal digital records cross the threshold of archival repositories. The thesis concludes with a summary of the main arguments and collates the best ideas, approaches, and technologies reviewed throughout to propose a hypothetical strategy for archiving personal digital records in the present. This thesis argues that significantly more work with records creators earlier in the record creation process must be done when archiving personal digital records because more proactive measures are required to capture and preserve these materials than was previously the case with paper-based or analog documentary forms.

Der Computer ersetzt in den letzten Jahrzehnten zunehmend analoge Schreibwerkzeuge und Kommunikationsmittel. Das hat auch Auswirkungen auf den Schaffensprozess von Schriftstellern, die ihre Aufzeichnungen immer häufiger als digitale Objekte hinterlassen. Für Literaturarchive stellt sich folglich die Aufgabe, zukünftig auch digitale Schriftstellernachlässe zu übernehmen und zu archivieren und hierfür eine Langzeitzeitarchivierungs-Strategie zu entwickeln. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem Zeitraum vor der Übernahme eines Nachlasses durch ein Literaturarchiv und stellt die Frage, welche Maßnahmen Nachlasskuratoren in Zusammenarbeit mit Schriftstellern ergreifen können, um die Langzeitarchivierung zu ermöglichen. Nachlässe sind in diesem Zeitraum noch die persönlichen Archive von Schriftstellern. Der Eingriff von Seiten der Kuratoren in persönliche Archive wird in dieser Arbeit als präkustodiale Intervention bezeichnet. Die Arbeit erörtert zunächst die theoretischen Grundlagen dieser Fragestellung und arbeitet die Notwendigkeit der präkustodialen Intervention in Schriftstellerarchive heraus. Anhand eines Literaturberichtes zeigt sie, dass der Forschungsstand in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz im Vergleich zu den englischsprachigen Ländern defizitär ist und identifiziert Ursachen für diesen Befund. Zudem werden aus der Literatur mögliche Maßnahmen der präkustodialen Intervention entnommen und weiterentwickelt. Daraufhin überprüfen Experteninterviews in ausgewählten Literaturarchiven sowie eine Schriftsteller-Befragung diesen Befund und reichern ihn mit weiteren Daten an. Basierend auf den Ergebnissen der Literaturrecherche und des empirischen Teils wird die Einrichtung einer Cloud-basierten Arbeits- und Archivierungsumgebung für Schriftsteller als Hauptbestandteil einer Interventions-Strategie für Literaturarchive vorgeschlagen. / In recent decades, the computer has been displacing increasingly analogue writing tools and means of communication. This has an impact on the creative process of writers as well who leave their records more and more as digital objects. Therefore, special collections are being confronted with the task to acquire and archive digital papers in the future and to develop a digital preservation strategy for them. The present thesis deals with the period before the acquisition of papers and manuscripts by a special collection and brings up the question what kind of measures curators could take in cooperation with writers in order to make digital preservation possible. During this period, papers are still the personal archives of writers. The intervention in personal archives on the part of the curators is referred to as pre-custodial intervention. The work initially discusses the theoretical foundations of this question and exposes the need of pre-custodial intervention in writers archives. By means of a literature review the thesis shows that the state of research in Germany, Austria and Switzerland compared to English-speaking countries is deficient and identifies reasons for this finding. In addition, possible actions of pre-custodial intervention are taken from the literature and developed further. Thereupon, expert interviews in selected special collections as well as an online survey of writers review this findings and fill them with other data. Based on the results of the literature review and the empirical part, a cloud-based archiving and working environment for writers is proposed as the main component of an intervention strategy for special collections.