Top of page

Archive: October 2012 (21 Posts)

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Fixity and Fluidity in Digital Preservation

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

Kent Anderson offers a provocative post in The Mirage of Fixity — Selling an Idea Before Understanding the Concept.  Anderson takes Nicholas Carr to task for an article in the Wall Street Journal bemoaning the death of textual fixity.  Here’s a quote from Carr: Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Using Wayback Machine for Research

Posted by: Butch Lazorchak

The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group at the Library of Congress. Prompted by questions from Library of Congress staff on how to more effectively use web archives to answer research questions, I recently gave a presentation on “Using Wayback Machine for Research” (PDF). I …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

The is of the Digital Object and the is of the Artifact

Posted by: Trevor Owens

Fixity is a key concept for digital preservation, a cornerstone even. As we’ve explained before, digital objects have a somewhat curious nature. Encoded in bits, you need to check to make sure that a given digital object is actually the same thing you started with. Thankfully, we have the ability to compute checksums, or cryptographic hashes. This …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Read All About It! An Update on the National Digital Newspaper Program

Posted by: Susan Manus

Here at the Library of Congress, there are many projects underway to digitize and make available vast amounts of historic, archival material.  One such project is the National Digital Newspaper Program, providing access to millions of pages from historic newspapers (a previous blog post provides an introduction).  Deb Thomas, NDNP program coordinator here at the …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

If You Can’t Open It, You Don’t Own It

Posted by: Leslie Johnston

On October 17, I had the extreme pleasure of hearing Cory Doctorow at the Library for talk entitled “A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond.”  Not surprisingly, the room was packed with attentive listeners. The talk covered a wide range of topics–his love of books as physical objects and his background working in libraries and …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Revisiting NISO’s “A Framework for Building Good Digital Collections”

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

Today’s guest post is by Carlos Martinez III, a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities intern in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. The National Information Standards Organization provides standards to help libraries, developers and publishers work together. Their report, A Framework Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections, is still as helpful to organizations today …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

My Weekend Project

Posted by: Erin Engle

I bought a new computer this summer.  I immediately copied all of my digital files from my old computer to my new one and to an external hard drive. Now I had three copies of my digital content on three different devices. Because if something happens to one of those media, I’ve got two others …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Bits Breaking Bad: The Atlas of Digital Damages

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

A question popped up in the blogosphere recently.  “Where is our Atlas of Digital Damages?” asked Barbara Sierman of the National Library of the Netherlands. She pointed out the amazement that would greet evidence of physical books, safely stored, with spontaneous and glaring changes in their content or appearance.  “Panic would be huge if this …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

DAMs Vs. LAMs: It’s On!

Posted by: Butch Lazorchak

As digital preservation and stewardship professionals, we approach digital objects from a unique perspective. We evaluate the long-term value of any particular digital object and work to develop a technical and social infrastructure that will enable us to successfully preserve the objects over time. Preserving and providing appropriate access are our primary functions, but no …