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By: Butch Lazorchak
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead. The United States national elections are a year away, but the Library of Congress is already busy archiving presidential campaign websites and preparing to archive House and Senate campaign sites and more starting in March 2012. This actually isn’t the earliest we’ve …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
Many of our readers are (hopefully) familiar with the NDSA , a large-scale collaboration of many organizations working together, pooling time and talents to create solutions for long term preservation of digital materials. The effort is growing by leaps and bounds – as a matter of fact, we’ve now reached a milestone – 100 organizations! …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Bill LeFurgy
The following is a guest post from Sharon M. Leon, Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Associate Professor at George Mason University. Historians are not the most likely candidates to design and develop an open source web publishing platform. But, as historians working at in the …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Mike Ashenfelder
This article is reprinted by request from the digitalpreservation.gov website. While the saying “New Zealand is far from everywhere” may be true, distance is not an issue regarding its digital cultural collections and how efficiently the National Library of New Zealand makes them available over the Internet. For a small country (population approximately 4,393,500 as …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Mike Ashenfelder
The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group. What is the average lifespan of webpage? Predictably, estimates vary and vary over time. A 1997 special report in Scientific American claimed 44 days. A subsequent 2001 academic study in IEEE Computer suggested 75 days. More recently, in …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Abbey Potter, Program Officer, NDIIPP. She is also Communications Officer for the IIPC. Today’s economic situation draws parallels with the booms and busts of markets past. Policy makers, pundits and economists (we hope) try to learn from the past, to not repeat mistakes or to try and duplicate …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Leslie Johnston
On October 20 I had the extreme pleasure of being one of the plenary speakers at the 2011 Best Practices Exchange. I rarely have the opportunity to get an hour all to myself to speak about pretty much whatever I want to talk about. One one hand, I wanted the opportunity to extend the topics …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Mike Ashenfelder
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. In early October, I began a postgraduate resident-in-study fellowship in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. I come to LC having received my MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and having worked on digitization …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Barry Wheeler, Digital Projects Coordinator, Office of Strategic Initiatives. The numbers are staggering – an estimated 2.5 billion people in the world have digital cameras! They take perhaps 3.75 billion pictures each year. And we love to share those pictures – hundreds of millions of pictures are uploaded …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
Note: We will occasionally post material to The Signal, with updates, that was previously published only on our website. The following is an article from our “Meeting the Challenge” series, October, 2010. Behind every digital object, there is usually metadata with descriptive information about the object. But the library world is all too aware that …
Posted in: The Signal