Preserving your digital legacy

This article in the front section of the Seattle Times caught my eye:

After death, Web sites help wrap up virtual lives:
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationwor...82938_virtual25.html

This story is about new services that make it easier for your heirs to get access to your on-line accounts after you die. This is certainly important, but it's just a piece of a bigger problem that I've been thinking about for a while.

What if you've created a lot of on-line content that you want to persist after you're gone? I think about this because I'm creating such content through my historical work and writing. Lots of other people must be creating meaningful on-line content that they want to endure. How will this happen?

The most obvious answer is that you bequeath your website(s) and so on to your heirs. But what if they aren't interested in it? What if they don't want to pay the ongoing costs to keep the material alive? I work with the Mountaineers History Committee and we regularly get requests from heirs to donate old photos, papers, and equipment that they can't or don't want to keep. This is what museums do all the time.

What about a person's digital legacy? Is anybody thinking about how to preserve that? I predict this will be a big question in a few years as the first "digital generation" reaches old age and begins to pass on.

I hope this isn't too depressing a topic to contemplate. But I find it quite intriguing.

This is a good question and one I've thought about as well. I know when my friend Ben passed away, there was cascade classics and the question of what to do with it. Friends and family ended up keeping the site frozen as is, but it just as easily could have been put to rest. So, having had the question arise before, I've thought about it for my own stuff and others, especially as I've seen sites disappear over the years, as people have either become tired maintaining, passed away, or didn't see the value in paying for webspace. You would think as space gets cheaper and cheaper, perhaps sites can be donated to an historical society of some sort...such as the mountaineers, or even an institution that is less specific? I don't know. Ha. I see room for a new internet business. LOL. Websitegraveyard.com or some such. Who's with me!

What about a service that prints out a hardcopy of a website in the form of a nice coffee-table book.

Here's a pointer to a currently-thin page put up by a researcher who has been spending some time looking into the question of "digital heirlooms."

Along with "what of all this will heirs really want to keep, and in what form" there are interesting new mundane logistical questions involved too, such as "should boilerplate wills have a spot to enter account passwords, and if you are changing them frequently (as suggested by good security protocol) is there a secure way to keep the will up-to-date w/o major hassle?"

What about a service that prints out a hardcopy of a website in the form of a nice coffee-table book.

Blurb.com has a "slurp" service that slurps a blog into a book. I've used it with success after a trip to Japan with students, where the kids blogged daily, and we turned it into said coffee-table book. I suspect the same could be done of other digital photo/text sites.