Top of page
By: Mike Ashenfelder
While clearing out some personal clutter recently, I came across an old CD-ROM, published in 1989, that I always assumed was of great cultural value. Of course, when I tried to play it I got nothing but error messages and I set about finding a way to make it work. The CD-ROM is the Electronic …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. In mid-October, BMS/Chace of Nashville, Tennessee, released the “first generation version” of a software tool to support the collection of metadata for the multi-track, multi-session sound recordings being produced in the music industry today. The Metadata for Recorded Sound …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Jennifer Gavin
The following is a guest post by Maria A. Pallante, Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office. See the new U.S. Copyright Office blog at http://blogs.loc.gov/copyrightdigitization/ Help Wanted: Have you ever attempted to build an electronic index and searchable database of a complex and diverse collection of 70 million imaged historical records? …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Mike Ashenfelder
The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. What are the access requirements for digital cultural heritage collections? This was one of the questions that the National Digital Stewardship Alliance started exploring earlier this year. Different access requirements result in very different kinds of preservation storage …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Martha Anderson
This post is part of a continuing series of alphabetically titled digital preservation topics. A few months ago, I met a special collections librarian at a conference. I asked if her library was receiving digital materials in their acquisitions. She said, “Yes, but we are not doing anything with them at this time.” I suggested …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. In Carl Fleischhauer’s recent four-part blog series, he discussed the challenges of, and different approaches to, capturing both the informational and the artifactual aspects of physical books and photographic negatives when reproducing these records in digital …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Bill LeFurgy
Events associated with the Kennedy assassination offer a compelling case study regarding obsolete data formats and digital preservation. Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy on this day 48 years ago, an organization turned to the latest computer technology in an effort to study the tragedy. From November 26 through December 3, 1963, the National …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Bill LeFurgy
The following is a guest post by David Brunton, a Supervisory Information Technology Specialist in the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. I have heard the National Digital Newspaper Program jokingly described as “putting breaking new online, within 200 years.” In some ways, it’s a fitting tag line: the most current newspaper pages released …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Butch Lazorchak
While most of us love a good movie about lawyers and the law, few of us read actual legal documents for fun. Well, I did say FEW of us… Earlier this summer I wrote a post about the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, a uniform law that will establish digital preservation protections for “official” state …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Steve McCollum, Digital Media Project Coordinator, Office of Strategic Initiatives. Central to any digital preservation strategy is making sure that the stuff you have is the right stuff. To that end, the Library of Congress endeavors to make sure that digital image files delivered by contractors in a …
Posted in: The Signal