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 …
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 …
The November 2013 Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available! In this issue: Digital Preservation Pioneer: Sam Brylawski Welcome NDSR Inaugural Class! New Report: Preserving.exe Digital Portals to State and Community History NDSA Report on Geospatial Data Lists of Upcoming events and educational courses Interviews with Edward McCain and Emily Gore Articles on …
The following is a guest post by Philip Ardery, the newest member of the Library’s Web Archiving team. I can trace my interest in computers and technology back to a single factor of my childhood: my family’s perpetually faulty home internet connection. While my multitude of siblings continually cursed and physically writhed over the frequent …
Those of us in the “cultural heritage” sector get used to being at the end of the line sometimes. With very few exceptions, the unique items that end up in our collections usually get here after all their primary value has been extracted. While we’d love to have a more regularized path for the treasures …
The following is a guest post by Leah Weinryb-Grohsgal, program officer in the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities is now accepting proposals for the National Digital Newspaper Program. The National Digital Newspaper Program is a partnership between NEH and the Library of Congress …
The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Web Archiving Service Manager for Stanford University Libraries. I’m inclined to blame the semantic flexibility of the word “archive” for the fact that someone with no previous exposure to web archives might variously suppose that they are: the result of saving web pages from the browser, …
The following is a guest post from Carla Miller of the Library of Congress. This is the second in a two-part update on the recent activities of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative. This article describes the work of the Still Image Working Group. The first article describes the work of the Audio-Visual Working Group. While …
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 …