Managing the Digital You: Where and How to Keep and Organize Your Digital Life

Managing the Digital You: Where and How to Keep and Organize Your Digital Life is a much-needed guide for those struggling with how to manage and preserve their digital items. Starting with a values assessment, this book helps readers identify what items are important to them personally so that they can effectively prioritize their time and effort. Covering multimedia, correspondence, legacy planning, password protection, photos, non-digital documents, financial and legal documents, and even social media archiving, this comprehensive text addresses how to get started and how to develop a plan for managing existing and future items.

Features include:

• Value assessment exercises to help readers identify what is a preservation priority to them personally
• Best practices for managing digital financial and legal documents
• How to save things from multiple devices, as well as social media sites
• Recommendations for scheduling maintenance activities and automating backup
• Guidelines for creating a personal management plan so that users are prepared to handle new and existing documents, photos, and other digital material for ongoing access

After reading this short primer, readers will be ready to:

1. better organize and identify what they already have in a digital form,
2. have a personal plan for knowing what to discard and what to retain,
3. know how to digitize papers, photographs, voicemail,
4. preserve email and social media postings, and
5. set up a workable long-term file naming and organizational structure.

Melody Condron has worked in libraries for over eight years, and has managed many data organization projects both on the job and in her personal work with genealogy and history projects. Melody received a Master’s in Library Science with a focus in Information Organization from the University of North Texas, and a B.A. in Communications and Media Studies from Penn State.