New students in the School of Information and Library Science now have access to a program that could change the way they store photos, documents and papers.
The program, LifeTime Library, is an online comprehensive file hosting site that is currently available to the school’s incoming students.
Gary Marchionini, dean of the school, said LifeTime Library is the first program of its kind to be used by a university in the nation.
With the program, students can permanently store and later retrieve computer files that are usually kept on hard drives and social media sites. The program’s data is stored on a series of disks managed by the school and other departments.
Marchionini, who dreamed up the program, said he began noticing 10 years ago how much information people stored on their computers.
“The idea came about that we should try to help our students who specialize in information management by providing them with a tool that will teach them to become good practitioners of their own personal record keeping,” he said.
Kristen Street, a first-year graduate student in the school, said she has enjoyed using LifeTime Library to store her photos.
“It would have been useful if I had started using it as an undergraduate because of how disorganized my stuff is now,” Street said.
Mike Conway, a graduate student in the school who helped create the program, said it is different from other file-saving sites because users have complete control over the storage of their files.
“You can be assured that the data you place on the site will be there when you attempt to retrieve it 10 years later,” Conway said.
Sites such as Facebook own all uploaded content and can remove files at any time, which served as an impetus for the project, Conway said.
Marchionini said it would take a great deal of money and faculty support from the University to make the program available campuswide.
