This unique text/reference advocates a novel forgetful approach to dealing with personal multimedia content in the long run, which is inspired by the effectiveness of human forgetting as a mechanism for helping us to stay focused on important things. The text presents theoretical foundations, technologies, applications, and case study results that help the reader to understand the problems and challenges associated with personal digital preservation, and the solutions that can be developed in response to these challenges.

Topics and features: Highlights the value of an intelligent and selective approach to personal multimedia preservation, involving managed forgetting and contextualized remembering; considers how a conceptual understanding of human memory function can be used to inspire the design of digital managed preservation and forgetting; discusses methods that endow computers with capabilities to understand digital content, in order to support intelligent preservation decisions; examines the assessment of the importance of information items, introducing the concepts of memory buoyancy and preservation value; reviews methods for preserving the context associated with a digital item, and for assessing how this context evolves over time; proposes a reference model for the Preserve-or-Forget (PoF) approach which is integrative, value-driven, brain-inspired, forgetful, and evolution-aware; describes the integration of preservation functionalities in a Personal Information Management (PIM) application; presents a user study on a photo selection task, using the results to design methods for automatically selecting important photos from personal collections.

This interdisciplinary volume provides significant insights from computer science, engineering and psychology that will be of great interest to researchers involved in multimedia and software engineering, multimedia preservation, cultural informatics, digital heritage, and the digital humanities.