As part of her closing presentation at the recent combined NDIIPP/NDSA partners meeting , Martha Anderson, Director of Program Management for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, said she has noticed a change taking place for organizations and that “no one is dealing with the tried and true anymore. The skills to innovate are different than the skills to sustain.”
And among our digital preservation partners, innovation is certainly taking place. To illustrate, Anderson listed the top developments for the Library of Congress and its partners since the last meeting in July, 2010. The depth of development is striking – and shows that no one in this arena is letting the grass grow under their feet.
Here are the top developments, as listed by Anderson:
Recollection, a new tool developed early this year by the Library of Congress, produces novel and intuitive interfaces for digital collections. To date, there are 1403 collections of at risk digital content from Library partners that have been made available through Recollection.
JHOVE2 – release of version 2.0
The JHOVE2 project team, which includes partnership organizations California Digital Library, Portico and Stanford, released the 2.0 version of this open source software. JHOVE performs format-specific identification, validation and characterization of digital objects.
Greater than the sum of our parts workshop at iPres, 2010
Representatives from NDIIPP and the European groups DPC, NESTOR and NCDD, gathered for the first time to discuss their experiences and explore possibilities for international alignment in digital preservation.
Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation
Representatives of the Library’s NDIIPP staff participated in this recent conference held in Tallinn, Estonia. This conference brought together various international organizations to explore how to create and sustain international collaborations for the preservation of our collective cultural memory.
The Launch of DuraCloud service
DuraCloud, a service launched this year by partner organization DuraSpace, is a hosted service and open technology that makes it easy for organizations and end users to use cloud services.
Our partnership colleagues and members of NDSA met this past December to begin planning this new initiative. The resulting framework now serves as the basic organizing structure for how the NDSA will function as a collaborative, volunteer organization.
Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center
Launched this past May, the Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center is a joint project with The Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University. This resource serves as the go-to place for geospatial data managers, librarians, archivists and anyone else concerned with the management of geospatial information, like digital maps, satellite imagery or GIS databases.
This year we launched our twitter account, which is now very active with 6,000 followers; it includes all the latest digital preservation news and developments for the Library and its partners. Follow us at @ndiipp !
Our long anticipated blog, The Signal, was launched in May, 2011. Updated daily, we discuss everything digital preservation – not only what’s happening here at the Library but also with our partners and covering everything including tools, project development, key people and organizations that have an impact on digital preservation.
NDIIPP Partners as Finalists for Digital Preservation Awards
Several NDIIPP-supported projects made the list of finalists for the Digital Preservation Award 2010:
Preserving Virtual Worlds, The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and the eventual winner of the award, The MEMENTO Project, Time Travel for the Web led by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Old Dominion University.
Newsletter reaches 18333 subscribers and counting
The Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter, a monthly digest of news and blog postings, has now reached 18,333 subscribers. (The latest issue is linked above.) Subscribers receive these monthly issues directly, either by RSS or by email.
Staff from NDIIPP manned the tables at this 2nd annual event, providing information and advice to the public about preserving their personal digital artifacts.
This NDIIPP-sponsored workshop took place last November and brought together researchers, bloggers, journalists, academics and archivists to address selection and preservation issues for hyper-local community news on the web.
Designing Storage Architectures for Preservation Collections
This NDIIPP-sponsored meeting took place last September and brought together technical industry experts, vendors, IT professionals, owners and managers of digital collections, government data specialists and other practitioners of digital preservation.