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Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
“The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation.” — George Washington The Veterans History Project honors the lives and service of all American veterans –not …
Posted in: Digital Content, Inside the Library
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Many cultural institutions have accelerated the development of their digital collections and data sets by allowing citizen volunteers to help with the millions of crucial tasks that archivists, scientists, librarians, and curators face. One of the ways institutions are addressing these challenges is through crowdsourcing. In this post, I’ll look at a few sample crowdsourcing projects …
Posted in: Digital Content, Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
The annual Personal Digital Archiving conference is about preserving any digital collection that falls outside the purview of large cultural institutions. Considering the expanding range of interests at each subsequent PDA conference, the meaning of the word “personal” has become thinly stretched to cover topics such as family history, community history, genealogy and digital humanities. New York …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
This is a guest post from Assistant Professor Kyong Eun Oh and Doctoral Student Vanessa Reyes, Simmons College School of Library and Information Science. I asked them to share their research with readers of The Signal because some of the digital preservation challenges that Simmons College faces — and Oh and Reyes researched — hold …
Posted in: Education and Training, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
The following guest post is a collaboration from Joanna DiPasquale (Vassar College), Amy Bocko (Wheaton College), Rachel Appel (Bryn Mawr College) and Sarah Walden (Amherst College) based on their panel presentation at the recent Personal Digital Archiving 2015 conference. I will write a detailed post about the conference — which the Library of Congress helped …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
By early December 2014, a Congressional election year, newly elected Members of Congress were preparing for public service as outgoing Members were ending their public service and attending exit briefings. At an event sponsored by the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress, the December 3rd “Life After Congress” seminar, Robin Reeder, Archivist of the …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving, Publications and Resources
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
When Kathleen O’Neill talks about digital collections, she slips effortlessly into the info-tech language that software engineers, librarians, archivists and other information technology professionals use to communicate with each other. O’Neill, a senior archives specialist in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, speaks with authority about topics such as file signatures, hex editors and checksums even …
Posted in: Digital Content, Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
In November, our colleagues at the Digital Preservation Coalition presented their Digital Preservation 2014 awards. These awards, which are given every two years, were established in 2004 to help raise awareness about digital preservation. The Library of Congress welcomes any public recognition of excellence in digital preservation. We, too, have given our own awards, most recently …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration