(NOTE: This is a reprinted and updated article from our digitalpreservation.gov website.) The motion picture industry is rapidly changing from film to digital media and within the next decade most movies will be shot, edited, distributed and projected digitally. Yet even as the industry embraces new technology, they may not be doing enough to archive …
Mike Wash is an engineer, technologist, inventor and visionary who holds 18 patents (search on the U.S. Patent Office site for “Wash; Michael L”), designed and implemented many of the standard automatic functions in modern digital and film cameras and — in an incredible feat of engineering — helped create a new data infrastructure for …
In part 1 of this story, I described the difficulty of accessing a commercial CD-ROM published in 1989. Eventually, out of frustration, I questioned its value and wondered who actually cared about outdated software. So I consulted some colleagues. It turns out that some gamers care, especially those who are fanatical about the original look …
While clearing out some personal clutter recently, I came across an old CD-ROM, published in 1989, that I always assumed was of great cultural value. Of course, when I tried to play it I got nothing but error messages and I set about finding a way to make it work. The CD-ROM is the Electronic …
The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. What are the access requirements for digital cultural heritage collections? This was one of the questions that the National Digital Stewardship Alliance started exploring earlier this year. Different access requirements result in very different kinds of preservation storage …
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 …
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 …
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. In early October, I began a postgraduate resident-in-study fellowship in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. I come to LC having received my MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and having worked on digitization …
“I just want to use it; I don’t want to know how it works.” – Unknown My Signal colleagues and I give out digital-preservation advice based on our research, our experiences and our understanding of best practices. We also try to pay attention to questions from the general public, with whom we interact at events …
