The following is a guest post by Christie Moffatt, Manager, Digital Manuscripts Program, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine Developing case studies around digital content subject areas has been a major focus of the NDSA Content Working Group, and the activity has enabled members to share the concerns and challenges specific to their communities. …
Here’s a simple experiment that involves asking an average person two questions. Question one is: “how do you feel about physical books?” Question two is: “how do you feel about digital data?” The first question almost surely will quickly elicit warm, positive exclamations about a life-long relationship with books, including the joy of using and …
We hear a constant stream of news about how crunching massive data collections will change everything from soup to nuts. Here on The Signal, it’s fair to say that scientific research data is close to the heart of our hopes, dreams and fears when it comes to big data: we’ve written over two-dozen posts touching on …
This is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Library of Congress Web Archiving Team Lead and Co-Chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Content Working Group You may have seen the news on this blog and elsewhere that the National Digital Stewardship Alliance launched the first ever National Agenda for Digital Stewardship last July. One …
The first images I recall of the Kennedy Assassination are grainy black and white television broadcasts. I was in the fourth grade 50 years ago today, and after an anguished announcement on the public address system, we were sent home. The TV was on in the living room with solemn reports. What followed over the …
The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Web Archiving Service Manager for Stanford University Libraries. I’m inclined to blame the semantic flexibility of the word “archive” for the fact that someone with no previous exposure to web archives might variously suppose that they are: the result of saving web pages from the browser, …
Given the popularity of 71 Digital Portals to State History from last month–we got many comments with great additions to that list–I thought it would be useful to extend the conversation to the local level. Unlike for the earlier post, we did not have the services of an intern to do the research, so the starting …
A recent NDIIPP intern, Ingrid Jernudd, did some research into current web resources that provide digital access to a broad array of primary source materials at the state level. She prepared a list of sites that billed themselves as general-interest portals to historical resources. Although the list is likely incomplete, I was surprised she found …
What’s so special about libraries? This is a rhetorical question, as I think libraries are amazing places. But many are dead serious in posing the query these days. To this point the answer has been new services built on top of the tremendous reservoir of goodwill that libraries have accrued over the decades. But technology …
Last October, I wrote about The Atlas of Digital Damages on Flickr. The idea was that it would be instructive to showcase digital content that suffered from problems roughly equivalent to physical content that was deteriorating due to mistakes or neglect. Since I last wrote about it, the atlas has acquired more examples reflecting all kinds of …
