Personal digital legacy preservation by libraries

The personal legacy created throughout a person's lifetime is increasingly dependent on the lifespan and reliability of computers and electronic data storage. This runs the risk that personal legacies stored electronically and often at web addresses unknown to successors may be less complete compared to legacies from the era of analogue data carriers. Dozens of online services have been launched over the past decade to address this problem, but many of them have been discontinued or are not reliable enough to entrust with important data. This article offers a critical review of already existing research on digital legacy preservation and an overview of the available tools and resources to demonstrate that libraries do not yet play an active role in preserving digital legacies, despite the fact that this could not only enhance the sustainability and reliability of preservation, but also be a marketable library service. With this article, the authors would like to draw attention to this service, which is still considered atypical today; provide an objective description of the current situation; and propose a preliminary model for developing such a service in order to set the stage for future research.