The Top 10 Blog Posts of 2014 on The Signal

We’re fans of lists here at the Library of Congress and there is no better way to close out the year on The Signal than taking a look back at our popular blog posts of the year.

Our most viewed post of the year, and our second most viewed post of all time since our blog launched in 2011, was the post about the discovery of unreleased Duke Nukem video game code. It generated quite a lot of buzz and was picked up by the gaming and technical news sites, including: Polygon, Engadget, Eurogamer, The Verge, Gamasutra, and CNET.

Here’s the entire list of top 10 posts of 2014 (out of 189 total posts), ranked by page views based on data as of December 22:

1. Duke’s Legacy: Video Game Source Disc Preservation at the Library of Congress
2. Personal Digital Archiving: The Basics of Scanning
3. What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers
4. Research is Magic: An Interview with Ethnographers Jason Nguyen & Kurt Baer
5. Exhibiting .gifs: An Interview with curator Jason Eppink
6. New NDSA Report: The Benefits and Risks of the PDF/A-3 File Format for Archival Institutions
7. We’re All Digital Archivists Now: An Interview with Sibyl Schaefer
8. The PDF’s Place in a History of Paper Knowledge: An Interview with Lisa Gitelman
9. What Does it Take to Be a Well-rounded Digital Archivist?
10. Digital Archiving: Making It Personal at the Public Library

And here are the top 10 posts with the most comments, based on data as of December 22:

1. Personal Digital Archiving: The Basics of Scanning
2. Duke’s Legacy: Video Game Source Disc Preservation at the Library of Congress
3. What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers
4. When it Comes to Keepsakes, What’s the Difference Between Physical and Digital?
5. Where are the Born-Digital Archives Test Data Sets?
6. Research and Development for Digital Cultural Heritage Preservation: A (Virtual and In-Person) Open Forum
7. What Does it Take to Be a Well-rounded Digital Archivist?
8. Comparing Formats for Still Image Digitizing: Part One
9. Data: A Love Story in the Making
10. Tag and Release: Acquiring & Making Available Infinitely Reproducible Digital Objects

It is heartening to see that most of the top posts of the year talk about jobs and skills in our profession, along with posts of interviews with practitioners working on stewarding various types of digital content. Looking specifically at the blog posts that generated the most comments, we were really excited to see excellent engagement and conversation occurring between commenters.

Thank you to all of our readers and commenters for making 2014 a memorable one on The Signal!