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Closing the Gap in Born-Digital and Made-Digital Curation

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This is a guest post by Jessica Tieman.

Photo of Jessica Tieman. Photo from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Jessica Tieman. Photo from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As part of the National Digital Stewardship Residency program, the 2015-2016 Washington, D.C. cohort will present their year-end symposium, entitled “Digital Frenemies: Closing the Gap in Born-Digital and Made-Digital Curation,” on Thursday, May 5th, 2016 at the National Library of Medicine. Since June, our colleague Nicole Contaxis has worked with NLM to create a pilot workflow for the curation, preservation and presentation of historically valuable software products developed by NLM.

Why “Digital Frenemies”? Our group has observed trends in digital stewardship that divide field expertise into “made digital” and “born digital.” We believe the landscape of the digital preservation field shouldn’t seem so divided. Rather, the future will be largely defined by the symbiotic relationships between content creation and format migration. It will depend on those endeavors where our user communities intersect rather than lead to us to focus on challenges specific to our individual areas of the field.

The symposium will showcase speakers from cultural heritage and academic institutions, who will address the relationship between digitized and born-digital material. Guest speakers will explore topics such as preserving complex software and game technologies through emulation, creating cultural digital collections through mobile public library labs, collecting and curating data and much more. Featured sessions will be presented by Jason Scott of the Archive Team; Mercè Crosas, chief data science and technology officer of the IQSS at Harvard University; and Caroline Catchpole from Culture in Transit.

The event is free but registration is required as space is limited. We encourage those interested in attending the event or following along on social media to visit our website.

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