ging could permanently change how we use and share personal data, enabling us to look back over our lives or search through and organize past experiences. It could help us find lost objects, recall names, retrieve details in documents, and review discussions in meetings. It might also offer new ways of sharing data with those we care about or offer up data to interested parties. While there are knotty privacy and security implications (a huge topic, not addressed here), the potential benefits warrant substantial programs of research and development. The vision is indeed compelling. Some proponents have even said that new technologies could give each of us a comprehensive set of “digital memories” to augment or even replace their biological counterparts. 2

But how sound are these goals? What benefits would the effort bring us? In reflecting on these questions we see we need a more focused and human-centered research agenda to realize the grand ambition. This, in turn, entails moving away from an obsession with “capturing everything” to a more precise specification of what it means to support human memory, leading to specific systems and concrete design implications.

was created, who it came from, and its relationships with other objects), making it easier to re-find information (such as Dumais et al. 10).

However, today’s lifelogging vision
extends beyond the mere storage of
desktop objects. Just as we can capture
and collect personal interactions with
documents, we can capture activities
away from the computer, out of the of-
fice, in the everyday world. Key to it all
is that many everyday activities can be
captured automatically and compre-
hensively through digital tools that
allow us to not only store important
content, but also contextual details of
the activities to help access the content
later. Note that we distinguish between
lifelogging and other more deliberate
activities involving the capture of per-
sonal data (such as digital photography
and blogging) that involve the effortful
selective capture and display of digital
materials for a particular audience. In
contrast, lifelogging seeks to be effort-
less and all-encompassing in terms of
data capture.

history

Despite the recent upsurge of interest, lifelogging systems are not new. They can be traced back to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “Memex” vision (a sort of desk) supporting the archiving, searching, and indexing of personal information stores revolving around documents with which we interact. 7 Since then, it has inspired many different systems, though mainly in research laboratories. Early forays were close to the original vision, confined to capturing digital objects within an integrated system. Both past11 and present12 examples are in fact infrastructures for storing collections of heterogeneous digital objects that users generate or encounter, including documents, photos, Web pages, and email. And as infrastructures have developed, so too have the tools for searching, browsing, and retrieving information from the collections. The tools often make use of metadata about the various aspects of an object’s past context, or provenance (such as when and where it

Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “memex” vision.