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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: Mike Ashenfelder
In 1971, Gary Marchionini had an epiphany about educational technology when he found himself competing with teletype machines for his students’ attention. Marchionini was teaching mathematics at a suburban Detroit junior high school the year that the school acquired four new teletype machines. The machines were networked to a computer, so a user could type …
Posted in: Partners and Collaboration
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
During Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season, you might take photos and video of friends and loved ones. You might make audio recordings of voices, conversations and music. Whatever you photograph or record, we hope you will take time to backup and preserve your digital stuff. As soon as you can, transfer the …
Posted in: Personal Archiving
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Dene (pronounced “Deenie”) Grigar’s mother was an artist who painted mainly with oils on canvas. But occasionally she painted on a different medium, such as wood or pottery. Once she experimented with painting on bamboo, a medium she was unfamiliar with. “Bamboo is porous,” said Grigar. “It can absorb the paint. So my mother compensated …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Information Today recently published Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage, a collection of essays written by some of the leading practitioners, thinkers and researchers in the emerging field of personal digital archiving. We are honored that Information Today — and especially the book’s editor, Donald Hawkins — asked us to share our resources and experiences …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
For this installment of the Content Matters interview series of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Content Working Group I interviewed Edward McCain, digital curator of journalism at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and the University of Missouri Libraries. The University of Missouri Libraries joined the NDSA this past summer. Ashenfelder: What is RJI’s relationship to …
Posted in: Content Matters Interview
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
I’m sure these types of classes will become standard at every library at some point. – Jon Eriksen Public libraries are becoming the front lines in the spread of digital literacy. This is evident in the calls for action contained in the Institute of Museum and Library Science’s “Building Digital Communities” guide and in the …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
When Sam Brylawski was a teenager he had to write a paper for his high school American history class about Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” so he did something that was ambitious for a high school student: he traveled to the Library of Congress to examine the composition’s original manuscript in the Gershwin collection. Brylawski found …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
In 2007, George Sanger and three other videogame industry leaders collaborated with the University of Texas at Austin to create the UT Videogame Archive at the Briscoe Center for American History. Sanger — who is best known by his persona, The Fat Man– is an award-winning, groundbreaking composer and sound designer who has created audio for more than 250 …
Posted in: Digital Content