The Top 14 Digital Preservation Posts of 2013 on The Signal

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 and the scope so broad that writing about it is like drinking from the proverbial firehose.

Back when The Signal was a mere eye gleam, institutional gatekeepers were, as is their wont, skeptical. “Can you make digital preservation interesting?” They asked. “Is there enough to write about? Will anyone care?”

While we responded with a bureaucratic version of “yes, of course!” to each question, we had to go prove it. Which, after many months and hundreds of posts, I think we have done.

I attribute success to stories that have meaning in the lives of our readers, most of whom care deeply about digital cultural heritage. As noted, that topic is as diverse as it is dynamic. A good way to gauge this is to consider the range of posts that were the most popular on the blog for the year. So here, ranked by page views based on the most current data, are our top 14 posts of 2013 (out of 257 total posts).

1. 71 Digital Portals to State History
2. You Say You Want a Resolution: How Much DPI/PPI is Too Much?
3. Is JPEG-2000 A Preservation Risk?
4. Scanning: DIY or Outsource
5. Snow Byte and the Seven Formats: A Digital Preservation Fairy Tale
6. Social Media Networks Stripping Data from Your Digital Photos
7. Fifty Digital Preservation Activities You Can Do
8. Announcing a Free “Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving” Publication
9. Top 10 Digital Preservation Developments of 2012
10. Analysis of Current Digital Preservation Policies: Archives, Libraries and Museums
11. The Metadata Games Crowdsourcing Toolset for Libraries & Archives: An Interview with Mary Flanagan
12. Doug Boyd and the Power of Digital Oral History in the 21st Century
13. Moving on Up: Web Archives Collection Has a New Presentation Home
14. Anatomy of a Web Archive

Special bonus: Page views are only one way to measure top-of-the-yearness. In the blogging world, comments are also important, as they indicate the degree to which readers engage with a post. By that measure, the top 14 posts of 2013 are slightly different.

1. 71 Digital Portals to State History (51 comments)
2. Snow Byte and the Seven Formats: A Digital Preservation Fairy Tale (21 comments)
3. Is JPEG-2000 A Preservation Risk? (17 comments)
4. 39 And Counting: Digital Portals to Local Community History (16 comments)
5. Social Media Networks Stripping Data from Your Digital Photos (14 comments)
6. You Say You Want a Resolution: How Much DPI/PPI is Too Much? (13 comments)
7. What Would You Call the Last Row of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation? (12 comments)
8. CURATEcamp Exhibition: Exhibition in and of the Digital Age (11 comments)
9. Word Processing: The Enduring Killer App (10 comments)
10. Older Personal Computers Aging Like Vintage Wine (if They Dodged the Landfill) (10 comments)
11. Scanning: DIY or Outsource (10 comments)
12. Where is the Applied Digital Preservation Research? (8 comments)
13. The “Spherical Mercator” of Time: Incorporating History in Digital Maps (8 comments)
14. Opportunity Knocks: Library of Congress Invites No-cost Digitization Proposals (7 comments)

Thank you to all our readers, and most especially to our commenters.