Abstract

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While preservation of digital content is now well established in memory institutions such as national libraries and archives, it is still in its infancy in most other organizations, and even more so for personal content. ForgetIT combines three new concepts to ease the adoption of preservation in the personal and organizational context, each overcoming major obstacles:

• First, Managed Forgetting models resource selection as a function of attention and significance dynamics. It is inspired by the important role of forgetting in human memory and focuses on characteristic signals of reduction in salience. For this purpose it relies on multi-faceted information assessment and offers customizable preservation options such as full  preservation, removing of redundancy, resource condensation, and also complete digital forgetting.
• Secondly, Synergetic Preservation crosses the chasm that exists between active information use and preservation management by making intelligent preservation processes an integral part of the content lifecycle in information management and by developing solutions for smooth bi-directional transitions.
• Thirdly, Contextualized Remembering targets keeping preserved content meaningful and useful. It will be based on a process of dynamic evolution-aware contextualization, which combines context extraction and packaging with evolution detection and intelligent re-contextualization.

To achieve these goals ForgetIT brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts in preservation, information management, information extraction, multimedia analysis, personal information management, storage computing, and cloud computing, as well as in cognitive psychology, law, and economics, who together will develop the innovative methods for realizing the ForgetIT approach.

The main expected outcomes are the flexible Preserve-or-Forget Framework for intelligent preservation management and, on top of it, two application pilots: one for personal preservation focussing on multimedia coverage of personal events and one for organizational preservation targeted at smooth preservation in organizational content management.

The ForgetIT project is expected to have different forms of socio-economic impact: a) The ForgetIT technology increases organizational productivity by enabling more concise forms of organizational memory, thus reducing the risk of work duplication and easing knowledge digestion; b) In addition, the project creates new economic opportunities for actors in technology development and consultation by opening up new application domains for preservation technology such as personal preservation as a service; c) The ForgetIT technology is an important building block for managing and preserving new bottom up forms of community memory and cultural history; and d) the managed forgetting approach provides the first step towards a promising alternative to the prevailing “keep it all” approach in our digital society.