Heads up, recent grad students! The National Digital Stewardship Residency program is in the works, and Library of Congress staff members are currently working with other institutions in the Washington, D.C. area to set up this new program, which promises to be a great opportunity for students to gain real world experience with digital preservation […]
The following is a guest post by Jennifer Gunter King, Director, Harold F. Johnson Library, Hampshire College. In July, scholars, entrepreneurs and digital preservation practitioners gathered in Arlington, Va., for the annual meeting of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, DigitalPreservation 2012. NDIIPP program management director Martha […]
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 […]
The launch of a new web site is the perfect opportunity for an organization to revamp itself. Information is refreshed and updated, new initiatives are touted while old content and projects get shuffled out of plain sight. Graphics and architectures change to better meet user needs and underlying technologies allow for easier management. Even an […]
Dan Perkel is a Design Researcher at IDEO. Last year, he finished is doctoral work at Berkley’s iSchool. His dissertation, Making Art, Creating Infrastructure: deviantART and the Production of the Web, involved an extensive ethnographic study of deviantART, a massive online community site built around sharing digital art. As part of our on going Insights […]
The first time I recall hearing a musical reference to computers or anything else digital was many years ago while listening to the Moody Blues. A high school girlfriend pulled out an album–On the Threshold of a Dream–and plopped it onto her portable record player. In the Beginning, the first track, opens with some trippy […]
This is a guest post from George Coulbourne, Executive Program Officer in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, Library of Congress. Braving the heat of an Indiana summer, 21 library, archive, and museum professionals recently completed the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program’s second Train-the-Trainer Workshop. Representing the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, […]
In separate “big data” presentations at the Digital Preservation 2012 meeting, Myron Guttmann of the National Science Foundation and Leslie Johnston of the Library of Congress described scenarios that seemed futuristic and fantastic but were in fact present-day realities. Both presenters spoke about researchers using powerful new processing tools to distill information from massive pools […]
Digital preservation’s many challenges (planning, choosing formats, metadata, storage, etc.), can be further complicated when dealing with multi-media cultural and arts materials. For example, music and dance performances that incorporate the digital may also include the element of chance, and can change with each performance. Or, maybe a piece of born digital artwork was created with several software programs that are already obsolete. […]
The five recipients of the inaugural NDSA innovation awards are exemplars of the creativity, diversity, and collaboration essential to supporting the digital preservation community as it works to preserve and make available digital materials. In an effort to learn more and share the work of the individuals, projects and institutions who won these awards I […]