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Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
The collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum include recorded accounts from people who experienced one of the most horrific events in history. And, by the very nature of these interviews, the Museum faces a unique challenge: the last of the potential interviewees are aging and dying. Time is running out and opportunities to record …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Lisa Weber is in the home stretch, heading toward her retirement from the National Archives and from a lifetime of facilitating change for the public good. One striking aspect of her long career is that she began as a traditional archivist and morphed into a hybrid of archivist, librarian and information technologist — a species …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Next week the University of Maryland will host Personal Digital Archiving 2013 (Erin Engle wrote about it on Tuesday). This is the fourth PDA conference since its inception in 2010 at the Internet Archive and its significance — for both cultural institutions and the general public — increases every year. It is the one major conference …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
As you play a digital music file on an audio-enabled device such as a computer or smart phone, the audio player displays information about the song. Sometimes that happens because the player has an associated database, sometime that happens because the information is embedded in the file. This blog is about embedding, how song information …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
The Library of Congress, the ALA’s Association for Library Collections and Technical Services and the Public Library Association have joined forces to spread information about personal digital archiving, using public libraries as information resources for local communities. Barbara A. Macikas, executive director of the PLA (a division of the American Library Association), said that the shared mission of …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Digital preservation and Internet access are not only transforming the way we record and convey history, they are also restoring the importance of humankind’s oldest means of storytelling: the oral tradition. One of the most influential leaders in this modern oral-history movement is Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History …
Posted in: Digital Content