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 …
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to talk (via email) with Paul Wheatley, of the SPRUCE Project,about an assortment of activities, issues and ideas relating to digital preservation. Leeds University Library is leading the Sustainable PReservation Using Community Engagement project, collaborating with the British Library, the Digital Preservation Coalition, the London School of Economics …
Learning by doing and benefiting from a community of practitioners are key aspects of our approach to meeting the challenge of digital preservation. The International Internet Preservation Consortium is an organization that must also focus on practical solutions and quick action. The web is a huge distributed resource and is changing constantly so it takes …
Quick quiz: Is the employment outlook for librarians growing or shrinking? The answer depends on what you call a “library job.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the job outlook for librarians is “slower than average,” with a projected rate of change in employment this decade of 7%, slower than the 14% average growth …
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 …
I like lists. I particularly like ordered lists. I’ve even read a book about checklists. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to point out a recent OCLC report, You’ve Got to Walk Before You Can Run: First Steps for Managing Born-Digital Content Received on Physical Media(PDF). The report focuses on practical approaches institutions …
In anticipation of the Museum Computer Network conference next week in Seattle, I’ve been giving some extra thought lately to museum community involvement in digital preservation. We (the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, that is) work with many partners from a range of industries, and in the last couple of years this has …
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 …
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 …