The Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference will be held on February 21-22 at the University of Maryland. This will be the first one that I’ve attended, but going by last year’s program, it should be full of discussions of practical issues. The very impressive keynote speech is available as a video. In it, Mike Ashenfelder says, “Today in 2012, most of the world’s leading cultural institutions are engaged in digital preservation of some sort, and we’re doing quite well after a decade. We have any number of meetings throughout the year — the ECDL, the JCDL, iPres, this — but despite this decade of institutional progress, we’ve neglected the general public, and that’s everybody.”

How do we address this gap? Perhaps we’ll come out of the conference with exciting new ideas.