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By: Butch Lazorchak
The following is a guest post from Micah Beck, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, and Jane Mandelbaum, Trevor Owens and Jefferson Bailey in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. What important big ideas are just around the corner in digital stewardship? What …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
Note: In the interest of long term access, we will occasionally post material to The Signal that was previously published only on our website. The following is an updated version of an article from our “Meeting the Challenge” series. The World Digital Library sounds improbable at first – many nations providing open access to highlights …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Martha Anderson
This is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. Some of you may have heard the recent news that The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) program, including their website, was to be terminated on January 15 due to a loss of funding. This impending loss grabbed the …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Butch Lazorchak
The January 2012 Library of Congress Digital Preservation newsletter is now available (PDF). In this issue: *A review of the Digital Formats Sustainability website and news about the addition of 35 geospatial formats to the site *Digital stewards are invited to comment on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy RFI on public …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Butch Lazorchak
Why should you care if a resource is authentic? Well, you’d care if you were a presidential candidate and an altered photograph contributed in a way to your ultimate loss. You might also care if you were a NASA scientist and a forgery introduced doubt about one of your agency’s most stellar historic achievements. Most …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Kristi Finefield
Can you imagine the D.C. skyline without the familiar obelisk of the Washington Monument? If Peter Force’s 1837 design had been chosen, it could have been a hollowed-out pyramid. Or what if Memorial Bridge welcomed visitors to the city with looming turrets and towers instead of the low profile it presents today? These possibilities and …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Bill LeFurgy
This is a guest post by Ellen O’Donnell, Technical Writer, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, who recently spent a year on detail in OSI. When shepherd Christopher Day made a routine check of his boss’s flock, he noticed that a sheep was missing. Word got around town. An alert policeman spotted a suspicious …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Peter Armenti
I’d like to echo Rob Casper’s previous post by welcoming you to “From the Catbird Seat.” My name is Peter Armenti, and I’m the poetry and literature reference specialist for the Library’s Digital Reference Section. During the ten years I’ve worked at the Library, one of my primary responsibilities has been to connect Library users …
Posted in: From the Catbird Seat
By: Mike Ashenfelder
Digital Antiquities is a 15-minute science-fiction film that considers the social impact of data recovery in the not-too-distant future. Its summary states, “By 2036, data loss has become a thing of the past. All digital media is instantly uploaded to the internet and permanently stored in the cloud, safely backed-up on servers scattered around the …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Leslie Johnston
In November of 2011 I had the pleasure of attending the annual World Digital Library partner’s meeting in Munich, Germany, hosted by the Bavarian State Library. This year’s meeting was a highly productive series of working sessions, highlighting the exceptional progress of the initiative and the current and future efforts of the partner institutions in …
Posted in: The Signal