We digital archivists warn about the risk of losing data with the assumption that the threat of loss is enough to stir people to action. But while most everyone has their own experience with data loss, people have a way of tucking past pain away rather than remaining hyper-vigilant about something similar happening again. Or […]
The following is a guest post by Tess Webre, an intern with NDIIPP at the Library of Congress. In a recent meeting, some colleagues and I discussed the age in which individuals should start understanding the basics of digital preservation. I suggested that, with children creating digital files earlier and earlier, it should be taught […]
Digitization–making a digital copy of a non-digital object–is a bedeviling topic for digital preservationists. Establishing a clear line of demarcation between the process of creating the digital copy and the process of keeping the copy over time is the central issue. I’ve always thought this was semantics. Well-meaning, but ill-informed, people said “digital preservation” when […]
Preservation Week 2013 is just over a month away, and we’ve been busy planning Library of Congress events. Every year, we like to mix things up and hold various types of events for our local Washington, DC communities. This year, we’re pleased to co-host the Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities on the evening […]
This is a guest post by Emily Reynolds, a former Library of Congress Junior Fellow and recent Alternative Spring Break intern. Last week, as part of the University of Michigan School of Information’s Alternative Spring Break program, I worked on a project to develop web archiving use cases for the International Internet Preservation Consortium. The […]
I was talking to one of my archivist colleagues about a collection he was processing and the challenges he was having identifying file types based on their extensions. The collection does go back several decades, but some of the file extensions were unrecognizable. This was when I confessed: during a period of time in my […]
Digital information professionals are converging on Austin, TX this week for the 26th annual South By Southwest conference and libraries, archives and museums will be there in force. Why is it important that LAMs have a strong presence at SXSW? Once you siphon off the (often overwhelming) branding and marketing noise, the value of SXSW […]
Lisa Weber is in the home stretch, heading toward her retirement from the National Archives and from a lifetime of facilitating change for the public good. One striking aspect of her long career is that she began as a traditional archivist and morphed into a hybrid of archivist, librarian and information technologist — a species […]
This is a guest post from Camille Salas, an intern with the Library of Congress. Violeta Ilik is the Metadata Cataloging Librarian at Texas A&M University Libraries. Violeta recently gave a presentation at the ALA Midwinter conference entitled “Linked Data for Holdings and Cataloging: The first step is the hardest!.” In the presentation, she described […]
Open source software is playing an important role in digital stewardship. In an effort to better understand the role open source software is playing, the NDSA infrastructure working group is reaching out to folks working on a range of open source projects. Our goal is to develop a better understanding of their work and how […]