People start personal digital archives for many reasons, and they can serve different purposes. Item appraisal is the process of looking through the potential items you want to save, assessing their relevance to the collection, deciding which items to keep, and which to throw away.
Relevance is only the first half of item appraisal and considering that personal digital archives and preservation projects vary from person to person, what the archivist defines as relevant to a collection is subjective.
For example, Jerry and Linda are both looking at photos saved to their phone. Jerry wants to clean up his phone storage and only keep photos of significant moments, while Linda wants to store her medical records/information all in one spot. Jerry would be inclined to keep a photo from family vacation, but a similar photo would have no place in Linda's collection. However, Linda and Jerry may both save a photo from a hospital visit, but for very different reasons. Both Linda and Jerry can argue that such a photo is relevant to their collection, while their collections have vastly different focuses.
When deciding an object's relevance, consider the following questions.
Step two in the item appraisal process is figuring out what types of files you have, and what to do with them. You will want to make sure that the items are not only openable, but in a format that can be opened by the devices you intend to use to access the collection. For example, some image formats saved on an iPhone may not be opened on a Windows system. If you have already had trouble accessing an item, say a video from a 2000s camera phone that won't open on your iPad, you may want to prioritize saving or transcoding it to avoid risks of loss.
When figuring out what types of files you have and their priority, consider the following questions.
