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Posted by: Leslie Johnston
One of the meetings I look the most forward to every year is the Open Repositories conference, which was recently held in Austin, Texas on June 6-11, 2011. One of the reasons that I enjoy this meeting so much is that is one of the most international meetings that I have the opportunity to participate …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events
Posted by: Martha Anderson
The diaries of George Washington, the first map that used the name “America,” jazz recordings from the 1920s, pictures from presidential inaugurations—the Library of Congress has a very diverse collection of documents, recordings, pictures and maps that help us understand the story of our nation. Most discussions of saving cultural heritage information involve looking into …
Posted in: Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
Economic sustainability is a key issue for digital preservation. In the 2002 report, Preserving Our Digital Heritage: Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the Library of Congress noted that preserving digital content required nontrivial resources. The report also said that forecasting future needs relating to digital preservation was difficult, and “there …
Posted in: Publications and Resources
Posted by: Susan Manus
There is a new collaboration under way, which is community driven, international in scope, and will be an invaluable resource for the entire digital library community. The “Unified Digital Formats Registry” is a project with the ambitious goal of providing online access and open information sharing for the entire range of digital format information. A …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
The following is a guest post by Erin Engle, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP. What do you get when you fill a room full of people interested in social sciences and technology? Oh – and DATA! Lots of data! Discussions about data, examples of data, uses of data. You get the annual IASSIST Conference! The organization has …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
The following is a guest post by Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP. I’m excited to launch a new series, Insights, for The Signal. Insights will feature interviews and conversations between National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation working group members and individuals working on projects related to preservation, access and stewardship of digital information. We are thrilled …
Posted in: Insights Interview, NDSA, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. The web turns 20 this year, and while national libraries, archives, universities, and other cultural heritage institutions have been archiving the web since the late 1990s, some key examples of the early web are not in any …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events
Posted by: Butch Lazorchak
A couple of years ago I picked up a reissue of a 1970 record by a band called Stark Reality. Their lone record is a funky jazz re-working of Hoagy Carmichael compositions for a children’s public television program: highly idiosyncratic but pleasingly unusual. Turns out that in addition to their album they composed the theme …
Posted in: Digital Content, Inside the Library, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
I keep lots of digital photographs. Hundreds—thousands?— of family members, colleagues and others reside in my collection and are, as Susan Sontag said, “illuminated by a flash, fixed forever.” As forever as I can manage, that is. Digital photos, like all computer files, are disturbingly prone to corruption and loss. As someone long involved with …
Posted in: Personal Archiving