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Posted by: Leslie Johnston
My first foray into online communities was in the mid- to late-1980s, when the organization I worked for got some of its online services through UCLA. We got limited access to email and access to the Usenet discussion system. If you’re not familiar with Usenet — which went live in 1980 — surprise! It’s still …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On May 20-21, 2013, the Library of Congress hosted one in its series of small invitational digital content at-risk summits, this one on the topic of software preservation. “Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software” covered a wide range of topics around software preservation, every type of software and interactive media art and engaged multiple …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
Yesterday, May 9, 2013, the U.S. government issued an executive order and an open data policy mandating that federal agencies collect and publish new datasets in open, machine-readable, and, whenever possible, non-proprietary formats. The new policy gives agencies six months to create an inventory of all the government-produced datasets they collect and maintain; a list …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
Image scanning of one sort or another has been in common usage in some industries since the 1920s. Yes, really, the 1920s. The news wire services used telephotography — where images are captured using photo cells and transmitted over phone lines — well into the 1990s. Scanners and digital cameras like those we are familiar …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
This past April 8 was the 2013 “Day of Digital Humanities.” Started in 2010, this is an annual event of blogging and tweeting about the experience of digital humanities by graduate students, professors, alt-academics, librarians and other participants who identify with the field. And “the field” of Digital Humanities can be whatever you define it …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I was exceptionally honored to be asked to give the opening keynote for code4lib 2013, one of the key meetings for library technologists. People may have thought that I would speak about, well, coding, or repository development, or online tools or even digital preservation. But I didn’t. I talked about community building. The code4lib community …
Posted in: Digital Content, NDSA
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the 2013 CurateGear meeting held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on January 9, 2013. And what a good experience it was. CurateGear is a somewhat unique experience because it focuses not on presentations, but on demonstrations. LIVE demonstrations. Every presenter gives a …
Posted in: Digital Content, Education and Training, Tools and Infrastructure