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Posted by: Trevor Owens
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Trevor Owens
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content, Publications and Resources
Posted by: Trevor Owens
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council, National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group co-chair and a former Fellow in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. In this installment of the Insights Interviews series, a project of the Innovation Working Group of the …
Posted in: Digital Content, Insights Interview, NDSA, Partners and Collaboration, Personal Archiving, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
In software development a release candidate is a beta version with the potential to be the final product. Welcome to the release candidate for the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. After some fantastic commentary on the blog, and presentations at a series of conferences to solicit feedback, I’m excited to share this revised version of the levels for further …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
Most of the conversations I end up in about digital preservation are about the digital versions of analog things. Discussions of documents, still and moving images and audio recordings are important, but as difficult as the problems surrounding these kinds of digital objects are, there is a harder problem: preserving executable content, aka software. Software isn’t …
Posted in: Digital Content, Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
PBS Off the Book has a nice short video on The Art of Glitch. It’s a fun story about a born-digital art phenomena, but aside from that, I think it’s useful at helping us better understand the nature of digital objects. In the video, artist Scott Fitzgerald gives the following concise argument for the value …
Posted in: Digital Content
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Trevor Owens
I had the distinct pleasure of hearing about the on-going development of the free and open-source Archivematica digital preservation system twice this year. First, from Peter Van Garderen at the CurateGear conference and second from Courtney Mumma at a recent briefing on the project for staff at The Library of Congress. Peter and Courtney both …
Posted in: Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
In what we hope will become a regular feature here on The Signal I am excited to have a chance to chat with Lori Emerson, a representative from the newest member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. Lori is the Director of the Media Archaeology Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure