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By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Tess Webre, an intern with NDIIPP at the Library of Congress. In a recent meeting, some colleagues and I discussed the age in which individuals should start understanding the basics of digital preservation. I suggested that, with children creating digital files earlier and earlier, it should be taught …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Bill LeFurgy
Digitization–making a digital copy of a non-digital object–is a bedeviling topic for digital preservationists. Establishing a clear line of demarcation between the process of creating the digital copy and the process of keeping the copy over time is the central issue. I’ve always thought this was semantics. Well-meaning, but ill-informed, people said “digital preservation” when …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Bill LeFurgy
This is a guest post by Emily Reynolds, a former Library of Congress Junior Fellow and recent Alternative Spring Break intern. Last week, as part of the University of Michigan School of Information’s Alternative Spring Break program, I worked on a project to develop web archiving use cases for the International Internet Preservation Consortium. The …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Leslie Johnston
I was talking to one of my archivist colleagues about a collection he was processing and the challenges he was having identifying file types based on their extensions. The collection does go back several decades, but some of the file extensions were unrecognizable. This was when I confessed: during a period of time in my …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Erin Allen
With pop culture changing at such a rapid pace, it’s no wonder our language changes with the times as well. Here today, gone tomorrow as they say. I wonder where that phrase came from? Barry Popik has made it his passion to discover word and phrase etymology. A lawyer and writer, Popik is a contributor …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Mike Ashenfelder
Lisa Weber is in the home stretch, heading toward her retirement from the National Archives and from a lifetime of facilitating change for the public good. One striking aspect of her long career is that she began as a traditional archivist and morphed into a hybrid of archivist, librarian and information technologist — a species …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Kristi Finefield
Everyone who knows me knows I love snow. If there is even the slightest chance for a snowfall here in the D.C. area, I am always glued to the weather forecast. I study the Doppler radar, scrutinize the predictions, and listen with bated breath to every watch, warning and advisory. It looks like my ever-dwindling …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Caitlin Rizzo
The following is a guest post made by Mason Henderson, a 2012-2013 intern at the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center. As a student of poetry in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, I have to admit that the Poetry and Literature Center is consistently spoiling me with brilliant poetry. On any …
Posted in: From the Catbird Seat
By: John Sayers
A century ago today, more than 5,000 women—and some intrepid men—marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital in what was billed as the Woman Suffrage Procession. The following is a guest post by Audrey Fischer, editor of the Library of Congress Magazine. It had been 65 years since the first women’s rights convention, in …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Barry Wheeler, Digital Projects Coordinator, Office of Strategic Initiatives. In Part 1 of this series, we examined how a simple scanner was built and showed how the manufacturer determined their claimed “resolution.” We noted that the International Standards Organization calls this the “sampling rate” and defines resolution differently. …
Posted in: The Signal