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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: Leslie Johnston
I increasingly deal with vintage hardware. Why? Because we have vintage media in our collections that we need to read to make preservation and access copies of the files stored on them. I spend a lot of time thinking about hardware that I have interacted with and managed over the years. Some of it was …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
Every year the Library of Congress hosts a meeting on Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections, aka the Preservation Storage Meeting. The 2013 meeting was held September 23-24, and featured an impressive array of presentations and discussions. The theme this year was standards. The term applies not just to media or to hardware, but to …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
This past weekend I got to do one of my favorite things of the year: work at the NDIIPP Digital Preservation booth at the 2013 National Book Festival. Why is it one of my favorite things to do each year? Because I get to hear from real people about what their personal digital preservation issues …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I was staring at a blank screen when my colleague David came into my office. I semi-jokingly asked him for a blog topic. “I have one for you,” he replied. “Content Archaeology. Discuss.” And with that he left my office. People know that I trained as an archaeologist and did fieldwork in multiple locations. I …
Posted in: Digital Content, Publications and Resources
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I am frequently asked about the difference between “traditional” preservation and digital preservation. My honest answer is that there are very few distinguishable differences. Preservation activities are never traditional – there is constant innovation in preservation techniques. Digital preservation is in many ways still developing its tools and techniques, but physical preservation is also evolving. …
Posted in: Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
A ten year-old recently asked what I do for a living. The response mostly involved explaining that the Library of Congress has digital collections and that I lead a team of people that take care of digital things, including writing software. I have often been asked by family, friends and complete strangers to explain what …
Posted in: Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I have had two conversation recently — one an intern and one with a friend outside our community — about my career path, and career paths in general around digital preservation. Paraphrasing, well, everyone (who may not know they are quoting the game Colossal Cave Adventure from 1976), it was a maze of twisty little …
Posted in: Digital Content, Education and Training
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
In May I was suffering from writer’s block and crowdsourced some topics for blog posts on Facebook. I got some very funny suggestions, many useful suggestions, and one that was both humorous and serious that kept sticking in my mind from my LC colleague Rosie Storey: “Digital content death cycle. Hoard, corrupt, abandon, neglect.” This …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure