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Archive: September 2011 (25 Posts)

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C is for Collections

Posted by: Martha Anderson

This is part of a series that explores the topic of digital preservation in an alphabetical way. Each post will use a word or phrase as a device to explore a concept and point to a useful resource for understanding specific aspects of the practice of digital preservation. Almost every week, I encounter some comments …

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Family History and Digital Preservation, part 2

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

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, …

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Library of Congress To Launch New Corps of Digital Preservation Trainers

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

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 …

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Lessons Learned for Sustainable Open Source Software for Libraries, Archives and Museums

Posted by: Butch Lazorchak

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 “Exhibit3@MIT: 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 …

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Archivists: What’s on Your Mind?

Posted by: Butch Lazorchak

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 …

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Remember When We had Photographs?

Posted by: Leslie Johnston

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 …

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Family History and Digital Preservation, part 1

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

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, …

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The Library: One Place for Publications and Data

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

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 …