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Storage trends have brought us to the point where it is affordable to keep a complete digital record of one's life, and capture methods are multiplying. To experiment with a lifetime store, we are digitizing everything possible from Gordon Bell's life. The MyLifeBits system is designed to store and manage a lifetime's worth of data. MyLifeBits enables the capture of web pages, telephone, radio and television. This demonstration highlights the application of typed links and database features to make a lifetime store something that is truly useful.

Developing a platform for recording, storing, and accessing a personal lifetime archive.

Extended AbstractWithin five years, our personal computers with terabyte disk drives will be able to store everything we read, write, hear, and many of the images we see including video. Vannevar Bush outlined such a system in his famous 1945 Memex article [1].For the last four years we have worked on MyLifeBits www.MyLifeBits.com, a system to digitally store everything from one's life, including books, articles, personal financial records, memorabilia, email, written correspondence, photos (time, location taken), telephone calls, video, television programs, and web pages visited. We recently added content from personal devices that automatically record photos and audio.The project started with the capture of Bell's content [2], followed by an effort to explore the use of the SQL database for storage and retrieval. Work has continued along these lines to extend content capture from every useful source e.g. a meeting capture system. The second phase of the project includes the design of tools and links for annotation, collections, cluster analysis, facets for characterizing the content, creation of timelines and stories, and other inherent database related capabilities, e.g. the ability to pivot on an event or photo or person to retrieve linked information [3]. Ideally we would like to have a system that would read every document, extract meta-data (e.g. Dublin Core) and classify it using multiple ontologies, faceted classifications, or the relevant. While such a system has implications for future computing devices and their users, these systems will only exist if we can effectively utilize the vast personal stores. Although our system is exploratory, the Stuff I've Seen system [4] demonstrates the utility and necessity of easy search and access to one's own data. Other research efforts with similar goals relating to personal information include Haystack [5], LifeStreams [6], and the UK "Memories for Life" Grand Challenge.There are serious research issues beyond the problem of making the information useful through rapid and easy retrieval. The "Dear Appy 1 " problem ("Dear Appy, My application, or platform, or media left me unreadable. Signed, Lost Data") is unsettling to archivists and computer professionals -and must be solved.