Digital Lives is a research project in the UK which is dealing with the implications of the digital age for collections of personal "papers" and other materials, including questions about what happens when they become part of today and tomorrow's special collections in research libraries. The project web page is at

http://www.bl.uk/digital-lives/

and the latest issue of Airadne has a very nice article on the project, at

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/williams-et-al/

The Digital Lives project is also collecting data through an online survey; I have reproduced the call for participation below.

Disclosure: I'm a member of the External Advisory Board for the project.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI

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Increasingly, our family memories, our personal achievements, our experiences of historical events, are being facilitated and recorded digitally.

Digital Lives is a pathfinding research project that is setting out to understand how individuals retain and manage their personal collections of computerised information  - everything from digital photographs and videos to favourite podcasts and sentimental email messages - and how these digital collections can best be captured in the first place and preserved in the long term, perhaps for family history, biographical or other purposes.

The project is led by Dr Jeremy Leighton John and colleagues at the British Library who, together with experts from UCL and Bristol University, are researching the challenges that lie ahead as more and more of our memories and documentary witnesses exist in electronic form.

We would like to invite you to take part in our research by completing an online survey.  This should take no more than ten minutes of your time and it will provide us with crucial information that will benefit the work of the British Library and other archives enormously as we plan for what is fast becoming a largely digital world.

If you would like to enter our Prize Draw and stand a chance of winning £200 in British Library gift vouchers (drawn at random and with no further obligation) you can register your interest at the end of the survey.

Please note that all responses are strictly confidential.  No individuals will be named when we report our findings, and the information collected will only be presented in an aggregated form.  You will not be contacted again as a result of completing this survey.

If you have any questions, or are concerned about the bona fides of this survey, please email me at University College London by clicking here: <mailto:i.rowlands@ucl.ac.uk>.

Dr Ian Rowlands (UCL School of Library, Archive & Information Studies)