The following is a guest post by Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP. I’m excited to launch a new series, Insights, for The Signal. Insights will feature interviews and conversations between National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation working group members and individuals working on projects related to preservation, access and stewardship of digital information. We are thrilled …
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. The web turns 20 this year, and while national libraries, archives, universities, and other cultural heritage institutions have been archiving the web since the late 1990s, some key examples of the early web are not in any …
A couple of years ago I picked up a reissue of a 1970 record by a band called Stark Reality. Their lone record is a funky jazz re-working of Hoagy Carmichael compositions for a children’s public television program: highly idiosyncratic but pleasingly unusual. Turns out that in addition to their album they composed the theme …
I keep lots of digital photographs. Hundreds—thousands?— of family members, colleagues and others reside in my collection and are, as Susan Sontag said, “illuminated by a flash, fixed forever.” As forever as I can manage, that is. Digital photos, like all computer files, are disturbingly prone to corruption and loss. As someone long involved with …
The following is a guest post by Steve Puglia, Manager of Conversion Support Services at the Library of Congress. When you work at the Library of Congress on digital preservation projects, you know you’ll have the opportunity to contribute to (and sometimes learn about) new and exciting endeavors in the realm of technology and content …
Over the past few years I have been organizing my family’s digital videos and digitizing our old videocassettes. All along I have tried to follow the personal digital archiving advice that my colleagues and I publish about organizing and backing up your personal collections. Now that I have collected, organized and stored our videos on …
The following is a guest post by Abbey Potter, Program Officer, NDIIPP. She is also Communications Officer for the IIPC. The Internet is a vast utility shared across borders and cultures–a resource like no other. It presents information from governments, news outlets, corporations, nonprofits and cultural heritage institutions with the thoughts, feelings and everyday outputs …
Libraries, archives, and museums are acquiring increasing numbers of born-digital collections. I’ve been interested to see the increased use of digital forensics tools in the appraisal and processing and accessing of such collections. But there are challenges. Some of the software tools come from the realm of legal forensics, where chain of custody and recovery …
The following is a guest post by Gloria Gonzalez, a 2011 Junior Fellow working with NDIIPP. The conclusion of May marked a significant event here at the Library of Congress—the arrival of the 2011 Junior Fellow interns. This year there are forty-one Junior Fellows; we spent the past week learning the history of the Library …
