In part 1 of this article, I wrote that relational databases are the engines that drive digital genealogy. Databases make it possible to quickly search through enormous quantities of records, find the person you’re looking for and discover related people and events. And when institutions collaborate and share databases, statistical information becomes enriched. For example, […]
The following is a guest post from Ellen O’Donnell, Senior Technical Writer, on assignment to the Office of Strategic Initiatives from the National Institutes of Health. The Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program at the Library of Congress will hold its first national train-the-trainer workshop on September 20-23, 2011, in Washington, DC. The DPOE Baseline […]
We are excited to share this guest post from MacKenzie Smith, Research Director at the MIT Libraries. At the joint NDIIPP/NDSA meeting this summer MacKenzie gave a talk titled “[email protected]: Lessons learned from 10 years of the Simile Project for building library open source software” in our session on open source tools and communities. The […]
What’s on the minds of archivists these days? Well, lots of things, judging from the program from the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists, held at the end of August in Chicago. The theme of this year’s conference was “Archives 360°,” and the 75th anniversary providing a convenient milestone for the profession […]
On a recent trip I visited a funky vintage store to see if anything caught my eye. While I was easily able to keep myself from buying any jewelry or taxidermy, I came across a number of displays of family photographs available for sale. Not only were there bowls of loose photos, there was a […]
The popularity of genealogy websites and TV shows is rapidly growing, mainly because the Internet has made it so convenient to access family history information. Almost everything can be done through the computer now. Before the digital age, genealogical research was not only laborious and time consuming, it also resulted in boxes of documents: photos, […]
Scientific data management has some buzz going. As a longtime data archivist/advocate this is a dream come true for me. I’ve pinched myself a couple of times to make sure it’s really happening. For decades, scientific practice focused attention on the published results of research. A substantial infrastructure supports this literature, including an article citation […]
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead. The second in my series of “ask the Recommending Officer” posts features a conversation with Cassy Ammen, who shares her experience in helping to build the September 11 Web Archive. Who are you, and what’s your job at the Library of Congress? […]
When was the last time you wrote a letter, on paper? Other than my note-to-self stickies (my desk usually has a bunch), or greeting cards, I personally have not written much of substance, just on paper, in a long time. These days, of course, we are engulfed in the digital versions of note writing – […]
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. I am attending the annual conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) in Frankfurt, Germany, hosted by the Hessischer Rundfunk (the public broadcasting unit for the German state of Hesse), the German public broadcasting archive, […]