Institute for Digital Life and Ephemera (2016)

The Institute for Digital Life and Ephemera was created in 2016 to address the increasing ephemerality of digital culture. Digital technologies allow us to create and share content across the globe more easily than ever before, but that culture is at risk of being lost for future generations.

As websites are taken down or revised, earlier versions are lost. Social media offers a record of daily life in the 21st Century but also vanishes into the digital ether. Devices quickly become obsolete and so how they were experienced and used also gets lost. The revolutions in storytelling facilitated by digital platforms have created fascinating, but intangible, experiences. IDLE is committed to developing an archive of digital culture that fully represents life in the 21st century. In only a few short years we have:

• Developed new digital archiving systems
• Collections over 5 million web pages,
• Gathered a sample of 200,000 social media accounts
• Archived 5,000 digital stories
• Synthesised and digitised the archives of 1,000 local newspapers
• Stored 1,000 digital devices and devised software to allow older content to play on new devices