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Posted by: Leslie Johnston
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On November 12, 2012, my home was broken into and robbed. I lost jewelry, some vintage tech (my beloved 1993 Mac Duo 230 laptop), and, more importantly, my netbook that I use for all my personal computing. I have learned a lot of lessons from that experience. First, I am very glad that I have …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
In honor of this week’s Museum Computer Network conference, I want to talk a bit about the early history of museum computing. Most people are not aware that MCN was born out of a cooperative computing project in the New York City area in 1967, under the direction of Dr. Jack Heller. Fifteen New York-area …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
The Library of Congress hosts a small annual meeting on preservation storage that brings vendors and the preservation community together to share points of view. The 2012 Designing Storage Architectures meeting was held on September 20-21, and as usual it was enlightening–and exciting. Two forms of large-scale storage have the largest amount of market share: …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I am introducing a new occasional feature for my posts on this blog — a series called “Before You Were Born.” When I was an undergraduate and a graduate student at UCLA in the 1980s, one of my faculty mentors had been teaching there since 1950. His name was Albert Hoxie†, an historian who lavishly …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I lead a group that develops software for the management, preservation and delivery of digital collections. In some organizations, digital preservation is part of the physical preservation unit. In some organizations, software development is part of the systems office. Or software development might be part of a central IT unit. I work with colleagues who …
Posted in: Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On July 26, 2012, the Library of Congress hosted CURATEcamp Processing: Processing Data/Processing Collections. The idea to hold a CurateCamp had been percolating for some time, but the event really came about through a fortuitously timed conversation with our colleague Meg Phillips at the National Archives and Records Administration, and the interest of our colleague …
Posted in: Outreach and Events
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
Not that repositories ever really were only about published scholarly output, but for some organizations that was the easiest first bar to reach. But at Open Repositories 2012, it was clear that the bar has been raised. OR2012, held at the University of Edinburgh from July 9-13, 2012, had over 480 registered attendees from over …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events