I think of “citizen archivists” as the first responders of history, arriving early on the scene to gather, capture, describe and preserve ephemeral artifacts of interest and helping to ensure that they survive over time to share with the future. Thoughts on citizen archivists and their importance to institutions like ours were running through my …
In this installment of the NDSA innovation working group’s ongoing series of innovation interviews I talk with Alison Langmead and Brian Beaton about the approach they are taking to teaching Digital Preservation at the University of Pittsburgh. Alison holds a joint appointment in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the School …
The perfect digital preservation system does not exist. It may someday, but I don’t expect to live to see it. Instead, people and organizations are working on iterations of systems, and system components, that are gradually improving how we steward digital content over time. This concept of perpetual beta has been around for a while; …
We produce occasional short videos related to digital preservation. These videos address such topics as personal digital archiving, adding descriptions to digital photographs and the K-12 Web Archiving program, to name a few. Our newest video profiles one of the Library of Congress’s most magnificent treasures: the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, located in …
This is a guest post by Jose “Ricky” Padilla, a HACU intern working with NDIIPP. More and more cultural heritage organizations are inviting their users to tag collection items to help aggregate, sort and filter collection items. If we could better understand how and why users tag and what they’re tagging we can better understand how …
The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Data Specialist for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. A previous post on this blog explored why it’s so hard to come up with a reliable measurement of the average lifespan of a webpage. In essence, the argument came down to this: links and the …
We have moved so far so fast with personal computing that older machines are acquiring a cultural patina. Everyone, seemingly, has a memory of ”old computers,” even if some people think having a hard drive under 100 gigabytes fits the definition. There are perhaps two ways to think about obsolete computers. One is as trash …
Image scanning of one sort or another has been in common usage in some industries since the 1920s. Yes, really, the 1920s. The news wire services used telephotography — where images are captured using photo cells and transmitted over phone lines — well into the 1990s. Scanners and digital cameras like those we are familiar …
The following is a guest post by Christie Moffatt, Manager, Digital Manuscripts Program, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine In this installment of the “Content Matters” series of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Content Working Group, I interview Dr. Sylvia Chou, PhD, MPH, Program Director of the National Cancer Institute’s Health Communication and …
The following is a guest post by Tess Webre, intern with NDIIPP at the Library of Congress Shall I compare thee to a closed format/ thou art more open and accessible. – Author after 3 coffees. In honor of William Shakespeare’s 449th birthday on April 23rd (observed) and as a tie-in with the recent digital …