This is a guest post written by Amanda May, Digital Projects Specialist in the Preservation Services Division. Her work includes managing digital files for the division, recovering data from removable media in Library collections, and providing consultation and services for born-digital collections data. Born-digital preservation work most often begins with a physical object – a …
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with over 173 million cataloged items. For the past decade, digitization of this enormous collection has increased exponentially. The Preservation Services Division (PSD) is responsible for a huge portion of this effort, managing contracts for the digitization of millions of pages of books, newspapers, and microfilm frames each year. All of this imaging results in a lot of data, hundreds of millions of files, and this is how we manage that data.
Libraries are beautiful, filthy places. The dirt you encounter here is more than just the dust you would expect in any building, it is the dust of decay. It is the whisper of tired books becoming brittle and disintegrating, microfilm breathing its last gasp, newspapers shriveling into nothingness, leather dissolving into powder. Of all of these ingredients, red rot is probably the most pervasive dust you would come across.
This is a guest post written by Katie Daughtry, Digital Library Technician in the Preservation Services Division. The Reformatting Projects Section (RPS) in the Preservation Services Division reformats collection materials in order to preserve the information found in at-risk materials and to allow access by researchers. General Collections books that are crumbling and contain highly …
This is a guest post by Amanda Felicijan, a Digital Library Technician in the Reformatting Projects Section of the Preservation Services Division. She writes about pinning and linking, a small, but vital, part of the process by which books in the collections are tracked.
The Preservation Services Division uses a wide array of specialized software in order to preserve born-digital collections, most of which originally arrived at the Library of Congress on external media such as floppy disks, optical disks, and hard drives. By using this software, staff are able to find and preserve millions of files that are otherwise trapped on older media.
“So Many Islands: Stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans” is a collection of stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. It was edited by Nicolas Laughlin with Nailah Folami Imoja with an introduction by Marlon James, winner of the Man Booker Prize. It was published in 2018 by Peekash …
