Wildcat Histories: Archiving University of Kentucky Student Voices

Self-archiving is the practice of organizing and maintaining one’s materials in an accessible manner. The benefit of self-archiving besides organization is that the materials are typically created by the individual/party doing the organization. With this in mind, the individual/party can add important information to the materials including names of people in photographs, context to certain forms or flyers, dates, and/or locations. The type of materials one can self-archive can be physical or digital.

Digital and born-digital materials would be housed and maintained from a cloud-based storage system like Google Drive, DropBox, and Microsoft OneDrive. Google Drive is the recommended system for self-archiving as it provides 15GB of free storage in comparison to DropBox with 2GB and Microsoft OneDrive with 5 GB. With Google Drive, it is important to communicate the Google email and password if collaborating with others as a part of an organization. Google also utilizes 2-step verification, so one individual would need to be responsible for allowing access to the storage system. If there are changes in responsibilities, the necessary information would need to be transferred. Cloud-based storage systems are best because they allow the individual/party to access their files regardless of location or device and only need a stable internet connection. The files are also automatically backed up to ensure that your files do not disappear. For additional safety, using more than one cloud-based storage system to save materials can be used.