Identifying the contours of personal archiving research: a scoping review
Amber L. Cushing, Robert FergusonPurpose
We conducted a scoping review to understand the landscape of literature described as personal archiving research and how it has evolved over three decades. Our objective was to understand how the term personal archiving is conceptualised in research over a 30-year period and to gain insight into how it relates to broader discussions about the making and keeping of archives, independent of discussions concerning professional archivists’ practices and jurisdictional control. We believe that whether one uses the term “personal archives” or “personal archiving” is more than a mere disciplinary preference; it signals a divide regarding what it means to perform contemporary archives work and the role of professional archivists in increasingly digital societies, where interacting with archives can regularly occur without interacting with a professional archivist. A secondary aim of our research is to explore the reasons why these two similar terms are considered distinct.
Design/methodology/approach
To build the dataset for this review, we conducted a keyword search using the terms “personal” AND “archiving” across three databases: LISA, LISTA and ACM Digital Library. We limited the results to publications written in English, peer-reviewed and published between January 1994 and January 2025. We also conducted manual backward citation chaining from the original, relevant results identified in the initial search. We charted each publication according to four sub-questions: (1) where does personal archiving research get published? (2) Who conducts research on personal archiving? (3) What motivates personal archiving research and what does it mean? (4) How is personal archiving studied?
Findings
We reviewed and charted a total of 142 publications over two rounds of data charting. Our results suggest that personal archiving research is largely published in venues associated with computing and design with the top authors based in these fields. The number of publications peaked in both 2011 and 2014, with 11 articles published in each year. Research on personal archiving was primarily published in archival studies journals during the early years of the dataset. Themes were identified regarding the motivations underlying the research.
Originality/value
This article is the first scoping review on the topic of personal archiving. It suggests that subtle difference in language use can make a meaningful distinction: while the term “personal archives” is preferred by archival studies researchers, “personal archiving” is preferred by computing and design researchers, as well as those exploring personal information management. The findings foreground a discussion on how research on archives work that takes place outside an institutional archive can inform the future of the archivist profession.