22nd October 2007

Digital Lives Research Project

We are pleased to announce that the Digital Lives Research Project webpages and blog have gone live on the British Library website - see www.bl.uk/digital-lives/ The Digital Lives project is designed to provide a major pathfinding study of personal digital collections. 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. We expect outcomes from our research to be of significant interest within the Arts and Humanities and the libraries, archives, and information sector. It will also be of potential interest to researchers exploring applications of digital memory in other areas such as health and aging populations and for individuals who wish to manage their own personal digital collections for family history or other purposes. The web pages provide access to further information on the project, the latest project news and developments via the Blog, and publications and other research outputs from the project as they are finalised and released. You can subscribe to feeds from the Blog to keep up to date with developments in the project and related initiatives worldwide. If you are undertaking similar or related research we will be very pleased to hear from you and exchange information. Please feel free to add to circulation of this announcement elsewhere through your contacts and to cite the url www.bl.uk/digital-lives/ in reference to the project. Neil Beagrie, British Library

10th October 2007

M4L featured on Radio 4

BBC Radio 4’s flagship science programme recently investigated why your whole lifetime of experience could be put into gigabytes of storage space. Presenter Quentin Cooper met Nigel Shadbolt, of the University of Southampton and Principal Investigator of the Memories for Life grand challenge and Yorick Wilks from the Oxford Internet Institute to find out about how to merge digital and physical worlds and how in the near future we could be storing all our memories for ever. Who will keep them, could they be kept private and how would it change our own concept of who we are? Also on National Poetry Day, poet Ashley Harrold contributed a poem about Memories for Life!