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Archive: 2012 (34 Posts)

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Imagine What We’ll Know This Time Next Week: An Interview with Bailey Smith and Anne Wootton of Pop Up Archive

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 …

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NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation: Release Candidate One

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 …

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Preserving.exe: A Short List of Readings on Software Preservation

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 …

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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 …

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Archivematica and the Open Source Mindset for Digital Preservation Systems

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 …

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Media Archaeology and Digital Stewardship: An interview with Lori Emerson

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 …