Digital Lives

BBC Memoryshare Initiative

I have recently come across the BBC Memoryshare site: an interesting example of an intermediary aggregating personal memories and collections and providing value-added services.

It is a BBC web service providing a platform for accessing and aggregating content relevant to any date since 1st January 1900. Registered users can post their memories and experiences relating to any day since that date, and can also comment on contributions from other people. The BBC is building the service to enable users to:

• write and post memories against dates

• browse existing memories aggregated by date

• view generic context information against dates

Contextual information (links to other content) can be accessed on each day view. These links lead to BBC Content and external content such as wikipedia. The aim is to provide contextual information in the form of News, Music, Sport, Arts, Broadcasting and associated events.

The project also aims to aggregate date-related data from within and outside the BBC and provide an interface for clients to query and request references based on those dates, date patterns and sources.

Welcome to the Digital Lives blog

Individuals are capturing and storing an ever-increasing amount of digital information about or for themselves, including emails, documents, articles, portfolios of work, digital images, and audio and video recordings. These personal collections created by leading researchers and authors, or by “ordinary” individuals, are often of immense future importance to research in a broad range of subjects including literary criticism, history, and history of science.

The Digital Lives project is designed to provide a major pathfinding study of these personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories. The project team drawn from the British Library, University College London and University of Bristol is led by Neil Beagrie of the British Library (the lead partner) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The research for Digital Lives commenced in September 2007 and will run for 18 months to March 2009. Subscribe to this blog for the latest project news and developments, as well as comment and opinion from members of the project team. The project webpages provide access to further information about Digital Lives, publications and other research outputs from the project as they are finalised and released.