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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 …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. A vexing property of digital objects is the difficulties they pose to ensuring their ongoing authenticity and stability. Files can become corrupted by use, bits can rot even when unused, and during transfer the parts essential …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration
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
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: 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: Trevor Owens
The following is a guest post from Meg Phillips, Electronic Records Lifecycle Coordinator for the National Archives and Records Administration. “What’s the bare minimum I can responsibly do with my electronic stuff?” was one of the central questions on the table at CurateCamp Processing. The unconference, focused on Processing Data / Processing Collections, was a …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Butch Lazorchak
The following is a guest post by Jimi Jones, Digital Audiovisual Formats Specialist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Digital preservation is an emergent field. Businesses, cultural memory institutions and government bodies that want to responsibly preserve and generate digital assets face significant challenges with respect to staffing. How many staff do we need? What …
Posted in: Education and Training, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources
Posted by: Trevor Owens
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. Over the last few months, we have been reporting results from the storage survey conducted by the NDSA Infrastructure Working Group, one of the five working groups of the The National Digital Stewardship Alliance. See the …
Posted in: Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Erin Engle
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. A number of us around the office have fielded some interesting questions recently, both at public events and over email, regarding digital preservation’s susceptibility to what I will call, for lack of a better term, cataclysmic …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events