On April 14, 2026, I virtually attended the conference Born-Digital Personal Archives: Status, Projects, and Ethical Questions organised by the National Library of Norway. Conference talks covered a variety of topics, including email and social media archiving, strategies for digital preservation, and processes for documenting the acquisition of born-digital archives. Excitingly, literary archives came up several times at the conference.

Physical literary archives are fruitful for providing insight into authors’ drafting and editing processes, as recent Bodleian exhibitions, such as the 2024–2025 exhibition Write, Cut, Rewrite and the recently closed Tradecraft, have shown. Hybrid and born-digital literary archives will change how scholars engage with writers’ works in pre-publication texts, as archives of physical and born-digital writing reveal or obscure different features of literary works in process. For example, word-processed drafts sometimes obscure editing through the process of typing, whereas manuscript drafts maintain their additions, strikeouts, alternating pen colours, and more. However, word-processed drafts can often be dated and arranged more accurately using metadata than manuscript drafts which are usually undated by the author. Born-digital writing also has the potential to reveal writing processes with extreme specificity: in collaboration with authors, genetic critics are pioneering the use of keystroke loggers to record authors’ writing in real time. The results of this cutting-edge research will eventually make their way into authors’ digital archives, and the ability to do further literary research will be enabled by the work digital archivists do to preserve them.

Kristel Roder of the Swiss National Library shared how born-digital archives are an essential part of the story of the Swiss Literary Archives. In 1991, author Friedrich Dürrenmatt donated his archive, which included over 100 floppy disks, to the Swiss government on the condition that the Swiss Literary Archives be founded. The story of Dürrenmatt’s floppy disks at the SLA is a reminder of a primary challenge of born-digital archives: that oftentimes reading digital data depends on proprietary hardware and software. In Dürrenmatt’s case, the SLA relied on the help of the Swiss army’s cryptology department which had the IBM computers necessary to read his disks and extract the data. Since this initial accession, the SLA has continued to build out its capacity to archive and describe born-digital material with the specific aim of elucidating the literary production process.

In addition to the challenge of proprietary software and hardware, born-digital archives also pose ethical challenges. When an author donates their physical archive, there is a clear boundary to the archive—what is donated constitutes the archives’ maximum extent save for any future accessions. With a digital archive, these boundaries are less clear. Oscar Rüdeberg of the National Library of Sweden discussed the potential of disk imaging to support the reconstruction of writers’ born-digital creative processes through emulation. While this is a clear benefit, disk imaging also uncovers deleted files which donors may not always be aware could be accessible to archivists. Archives must balance the risks and benefits of disk imaging, as well as balance the sometimes-competing wishes of donors and researchers as they pertain to the completeness of digital collections.

Rather than carrying out disk imaging, the Royal Library of Denmark took an unusual but rewarding approach to preserving a born-digital component of the archive of Danish writer Svend Åge Madsen. Madsen used a unique ‘macro-text’ to manage the network of recurring characters and stories which stretched across his various literary works. Acquiring this macro-text required creative thinking on the part of the Library, as it was stored in a fragile 1989 WordPerfect DOS. In addition to using standard digital preservation techniques to archive the macro-text, the Library chose to record a video of Madsen’s computer screen with his own explanation of the system and his working process. This allowed the Library to document and contextualise the structure and function of the macro-text to protect against any limitations imposed by the digital preservation process. Royal Library of Denmark researcher Thomas Hvid Kromann argued that expanded supporting documentation of digital archives, like the macro-text video, will better allow future researchers to critically engage with born-digital literary archives.

At the National Library of Norway’s Born-Digital Personal Archives conference, it was exciting to hear how colleagues in the profession are preparing for born-digital literary archives to become available to researchers and consider what possibilities these archives will provide for cutting-edge literary scholarship into the ways authors’ working processes are being reshaped by technological change.