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By: Susan Manus
Many of our readers may remember a unique blog post written by our former intern, Tess Webre. Tess took a very creative, educational approach to the subject of digital preservation and created Snow Byte and the Seven Formats, A Digital Preservation Fairy Tale. This post turned out to be so popular (see the many comments), …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Butch Lazorchak
I was at a recent meeting of the Federal Geographic Data Committeee’s Coordination Group and Anne Castle, the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science in the Department of the Interior and the co-chair of the FGDC Steering Committee, was discussing the challenges of finding resources to support geospatial activity. The federal geospatial community is working …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Leslie Johnston
I was staring at a blank screen when my colleague David came into my office. I semi-jokingly asked him for a blog topic. “I have one for you,” he replied. “Content Archaeology. Discuss.” And with that he left my office. People know that I trained as an archaeologist and did fieldwork in multiple locations. I …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Mike Ashenfelder
When Sam Brylawski was a teenager he had to write a paper for his high school American history class about Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” so he did something that was ambitious for a high school student: he traveled to the Library of Congress to examine the composition’s original manuscript in the Gershwin collection. Brylawski found …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Erin Allen
Let’s take a look back at some of the posts populating the Library of Congress blogosphere in August. In the Muse: Performing Arts Blog “We’ll walk hand and hand someday” — Music and the March on Washington Music played a pivotal role in the March on Washington. Inside Adams: Science, Technology & Business No Opera, …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Bill LeFurgy
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 …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Erin Allen
(The following is a story written by Lindsey Hobbs of the Library’s Preservation Directorate for the Library of Congress staff newsletter, The Gazette.) Pulp-fiction authors created some of the most enduring characters of any literary genre including Tarzan, detective Sam Spade, and the sword-wielding Zorro. The magazines that illustrated their exploits, unfortunately, haven’t fared as …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Erin Allen
(The following is a guest post by Guha Shankar, folklife specialist in the American Folklife Center and the Library’s project director of the Civil Rights History Project, and Kate Stewart, processing archivist in the American Folklife Center, who is principally responsible for organizing and making available collections with Civil Rights content in the division to …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Trevor Owens
A single photograph in a personal collection or archive might be represented by any number of derivative files of varying sizes, in varying formats, all with different sets of embedded metadata. At the bit level, all of the variations of the photograph are unique. However, in practice, a particular individual or organization might just be …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Erin Allen
“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” – Thomas Edison In August 1795, John Fitch not only demonstrated the first successful steamboat but was also granted a United States patent for his invention. A century later, on Aug. 12, 1877, Thomas Alva Edison is believed to have completed the model for …
Posted in: Timeless