In conversations with professional colleagues, I find we rarely talk about “the why” of digital preservation. We take it as an article of faith that what we do is important, so much so that we worry that we should be doing more, saving more. Sadness arises when we hear about loss, such as when a …
As this calendar year comes to a close, I’m thinking about my favorite work highlights from this past year. I’m happy to say there have been many, but Preservation Week tops my list. For the past few years, the Library of Congress has celebrated ALA’s Preservation Week, holding public outreach events to promote the importance …
We are all pretty familiar with the process of scanning texts to produce page images and converting them using optical character recognition to full-text indexing and searching. But electronic texts have a far older-pedigree. Text digitization in the cultural heritage sector started in earnest in 1971, when the first Project Gutenberg text — the United …
This is a guest post from Camille Salas, an intern with the Library of Congress. My first experience working in a cultural heritage institution was as a teen docent at the El Paso Museum of Art in the mid-1990s. It is difficult to find details about the teen program now but it was open to high …
In a previous interview about the Library of Congress collection of video games, David Gibson put out an open call for folks to contact him about donating their video games and video game ephemera to the Library. As soon as he mentioned this in the interview I knew I needed to ask him if I …
I am happy to have had the chance to interview Jan Ziolkowski, Director, and Yota Batsaki, Executive Director, of Dumbarton Oaks, about some recent developments involving use of technology to enhance the institution’s collections. Bill: The Dumbarton Oaks collections are as fascinating as they are diverse, relating as they do to Byzantine, Pre-Columbian and Garden …
This post is adapted from remarks I gave to the judging panel for the 2012 Digital Preservation Award on behalf of The Signal. We were honored to be among the finalists for the award, which was subsequently won by The Digital Preservation Training Programme, University of London Computing Centre (to whom we offer hearty congratulations!). …
Fifty years from now, what currently accessible web content will be invaluable for understanding science in our era? What kinds of uses do you imagine this science content serving? Where are the natural curatorial homes for this online content and how can we work together to collect, preserve, and provide access to science on the …
The December 2012 Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/newsletter/201212.pdf In this issue: Digital Preservation Pioneer: Martha Anderson, Director Program Management NDIIPP Levels of Digital Preservation Candidate One Release Find out about the latest PDF/A specification: PDF/A-3 Did you know that museums had computer networks in the 1960’s? Read about a recent …