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Posted by: Butch Lazorchak
The end of the year is a great time to take stock. I’m currently in the “have I done irrevocable damage to my body during the holiday snacking season” phase of stock-taking. Luckily, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance isn’t concerned with whether anyone’s going to eat that last cookie and has a higher purpose than …
Posted in: NDSA, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
Curiously, most of us in the digital memory business are hesitant to visually document our own work. Possibly this has to do with the perceived nature of the enterprise, which involves tasks that may seem routine. But pictures tell an important story, and I set about finding a few that depicted some of the digital preservation …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Trevor Owens
The NDSA levels of digital preservation are useful in providing a high-level, at-a-glance overview of tiered guidance for planning for digital preservation. One of the most common requests received by the NDSA group working on this is that we provide more in-depth information on the issues discussed in each cell. To that end, we are …
Posted in: NDSA, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
And if so, why would you ever want to? About a year ago the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections announced a rather exciting project, to digitize the data tapes from the Explorer I satellite mission. My first thought: the data on these tapes is likely digital to begin with, so there’s not really something …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
After reading a great post by the Smithsonian Institution Archives on Archiving Family Traditions, I started thinking about my own activities as a steward of my and my family’s digital life. I give myself a “C” at best. Now, I am not a bad steward of my own digital life. I make sure there are …
Posted in: Personal Archiving
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
The humble bloggers who toil on behalf of The Signal strive to tell stimulating stories about digital stewardship. This is unusual labor. It blends passion for a rapidly evolving subject with exacting choices about what to focus on. Collecting, preserving and making available digital resources is driving enormous change, and the pace is so fast …
Posted in: Inside the Library, Outreach and Events
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Steven Puglia, manager of Digital Conversion Services at the Library of Congress, died peacefully on December 10, 2013 after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. Puglia had a profound effect on his colleagues here in Washington and worldwide, and there is a great outpouring of grief and appreciation in the wake of his passing. The …
Posted in: FADGI, Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Susan Manus
A few weeks ago, as part of the Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation conference, an announcement was made of the beta launch of a new resource to catalog and describe digital preservation tools: Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry. The idea behind this registry is to try and consolidate all of the digital preservation tool …
Posted in: Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Butch Lazorchak
The following is a guest post by report co-authors and NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group members: Winston Atkins, Duke University Libraries Andrea Goethals, Harvard Library Carol Kussmann, Minnesota State Archives Meg Phillips, National Archives and Records Administration Mary Vardigan, Inter‐university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) The results of the 2012 National Digital …
Posted in: Education and Training, NDSA, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources