When we created the concept of LifeStories there were two objectives. The first was to create the tools to allow us to create complex media-rich LifeStories for our clients. We have achieved that objective.

The second was to create an organisation and physical infrastructure to store, refactor and publish these LifeStories long into the future. (see our thoughts on the persistence of data).

From the beginning, we have designed the LifeStories that we create so that they can easily be migrated to new hardware, and they share a common design that ensures that in the future they can be published on the web, or whatever it evolves into.

You might ask why you would want to do this? Certainly, during your lifetime there are probably going to be parts of your LifeStory that are private. However, at some stage (perhaps after you’ve died)  it might be acceptable for the public at large to access your LifeStory. Even then it is still possible in our design to partition off private elements while making some of it public.

The process of migrating today’s LifeStories long into the future is what we refer to as The Archive. We envision it as a physical facility where we store, maintain and curate our client’s LifeStories. 

It is our goal to build or acquire this facility within the next 10 years so that the LifeStories that we create in that period will have a permanent long-term home.