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Archive: November 2011 (21 Posts)

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Have Obsolete Digital Media, Will Travel

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post by Keri A. Myers, a volunteer archivist with NDIIPP. I never planned to have obsolete digital storage media as a traveling companion.  It just kind of happened.  And I’m an archivist with lots of experience working with digital materials! This summer I relocated to the Washington DC area after …

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Hashing Out Digital Trust

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post by Kate Zwaard, a Supervisory Information Technology Specialist in the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. The Library of Congress and its partners continue to work on ways to help users communicate and evaluate trustworthiness of the electronic material they are accessing. The risk is higher for some …

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Learning About Your Collections With Viewshare

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. In From Records to Data: It’s Not Just About Collections Any More, Leslie Johnston explained how she is increasingly seeing a need for librarians, archivists and curators to shift from thinking about their collections as sets of individual …

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Digital Preservation Outreach through the NDSA

Posted by: Susan Manus

Many of our readers are (hopefully) familiar with the NDSA , a large-scale collaboration of many organizations working together, pooling time and talents to create solutions for long term preservation of digital materials.  The effort is growing by leaps and bounds  – as a matter of fact, we’ve now reached a milestone – 100 organizations! …

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Growing Open Source Communities: Omeka, End Users, Designers and Developers

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post from Sharon M. Leon, Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Associate Professor at George Mason University. Historians are not the most likely candidates to design and develop an open source web publishing platform. But, as historians working at in the …

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Profile: The National Library of New Zealand

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

This article is reprinted by request from the digitalpreservation.gov website. While the saying “New Zealand is far from everywhere” may be true, distance is not an issue regarding its digital cultural collections and how efficiently the National Library of New Zealand makes them available over the Internet. For a small country (population approximately 4,393,500 as …

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The Average Lifespan of a Webpage

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group. What is the average lifespan of webpage? Predictably, estimates vary and vary over time. A 1997 special report in Scientific American claimed 44 days. A subsequent 2001 academic study in IEEE Computer suggested 75 days. More recently, in …

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Preserving Business History

Posted by: Susan Manus

The following is a guest post by Abbey Potter, Program Officer, NDIIPP.  She is also Communications Officer for the IIPC. Today’s economic situation draws parallels with the booms and busts of markets past. Policy makers, pundits and economists (we hope) try to learn from the past, to not repeat mistakes or to try and duplicate …

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From Records to Data: It’s Not Just About Collections Any More

Posted by: Leslie Johnston

On October 20 I had the extreme pleasure of being one of the plenary speakers at the 2011 Best Practices Exchange.  I rarely have the opportunity to get an hour all to myself to speak about pretty much whatever I want to talk about. One one hand, I wanted the opportunity to extend the topics …