Continuing strides in processing, storage, sensing, and networking technologies are enabling people to capture their activities and experiences as greater volumes of ever-richer media. A big emerging challenge today is the organization, retrieval, and exploitation of such multimedia data surrounding the activities of individuals or enterprises. The field of multimedia electronic chronicles deals with the unified contextual organization, presentation, and analysis of temporal streams of multimedia data captured by individuals, groups, or organizations. The value of electronic chronicles is in converting activity and experience from the past into actionable intelligence in the present. Such multimedia electronic chronicles, with their associated techniques for search and navigation, analysis and reasoning, and prediction and alerting, will have enormous impact on various spheres of life spanning enhancement of personal life, business productivity, entertainment, and government operations. This paper, which serves as a companion to a keynote talk by the first author at ICME 2005, explains the notion of electronic chronicles and outlines the research challenges in this area.