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By: Erin Engle
I like lists. I particularly like ordered lists. I’ve even read a book about checklists. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to point out a recent OCLC report, You’ve Got to Walk Before You Can Run: First Steps for Managing Born-Digital Content Received on Physical Media(PDF). The report focuses on practical approaches institutions …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
In anticipation of the Museum Computer Network conference next week in Seattle, I’ve been giving some extra thought lately to museum community involvement in digital preservation. We (the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, that is) work with many partners from a range of industries, and in the last couple of years this has …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Bill LeFurgy
Kent Anderson offers a provocative post in The Mirage of Fixity — Selling an Idea Before Understanding the Concept. Anderson takes Nicholas Carr to task for an article in the Wall Street Journal bemoaning the death of textual fixity. Here’s a quote from Carr: Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Butch Lazorchak
The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group at the Library of Congress. Prompted by questions from Library of Congress staff on how to more effectively use web archives to answer research questions, I recently gave a presentation on “Using Wayback Machine for Research” (PDF). I …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Trevor Owens
Fixity is a key concept for digital preservation, a cornerstone even. As we’ve explained before, digital objects have a somewhat curious nature. Encoded in bits, you need to check to make sure that a given digital object is actually the same thing you started with. Thankfully, we have the ability to compute checksums, or cryptographic hashes. This …
Posted in: The Signal
Every year I look forward to mid-October when the Einstein Fellows visit the Science Reference Section. The Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellows Program is made up of master teachers from across the United States and is sponsored by the Triangle Coalition for Science and Technology Education. The Einsteins, as I like to call them, spend …
Posted in: Inside Adams
By: Erin Allen
LeRoy Gresham (1847-1865) was a teenaged invalid who kept a diary for nearly every day of the Civil War, recording the news, his Confederate sympathies and perceptive details about life on the homefront as he experienced the conflict through newspapers, letters and personal visitors. The son of an attorney, judge, and plantation owner in Macon, …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Susan Manus
Here at the Library of Congress, there are many projects underway to digitize and make available vast amounts of historic, archival material. One such project is the National Digital Newspaper Program, providing access to millions of pages from historic newspapers (a previous blog post provides an introduction). Deb Thomas, NDNP program coordinator here at the …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Leslie Johnston
On October 17, I had the extreme pleasure of hearing Cory Doctorow at the Library for talk entitled “A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond.” Not surprisingly, the room was packed with attentive listeners. The talk covered a wide range of topics–his love of books as physical objects and his background working in libraries and …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Mike Ashenfelder
Today’s guest post is by Carlos Martinez III, a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities intern in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. The National Information Standards Organization provides standards to help libraries, developers and publishers work together. Their report, A Framework Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections, is still as helpful to organizations today …
Posted in: The Signal