Continuing the NDSA Insights interview series, I am thrilled to talk about the new Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications with Ted Westervelt, head of acquisitions and cataloging for U.S. Serials – Arts, Humanities & Sciences at the Library of Congress. Ted has been overseeing the development of the Recommended Format Specifications. While the specifications …
What is the document as a format and a medium? Even apart from any divide between analog and digital, the document is itself a form that has its own history, one that has long been tied up in ideas about reproduction. In Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Lisa Gitelman explores the history …
Digital Preservation 2014 is hosting such a rich variety of presentations that we at the Signal want to preview some of them for you. Today, as part of our Insights Interview series, we present a Q&A with Bradley Daigle, director of Digital Curation Services and digital strategist for Special Collections at the University of Virginia …
The design and structure of cultural heritage institutions and systems comes with a values and a politics. The values and politics of these infrastructures are often worked out and explored in the work of artists in a range of media. This is just as true of physical structures and spaces as it is of digital …
Who would have thought when CompuServe introduced the Graphics Interchange Format in 1987 that the world was witnessing the birth of a new medium of expression? At Digital Preservation 2012 keynote speaker Anil Dash suggested that the humble animated GIF was likely “the most watched form of video?” Animated GIFs are increasingly being appreciated as …
What does the history of the MP3 format mean for those interested in ensuring long-term access to our digital cultural heritage? In this installment of the NDSA’s Insights interview series I talk with historian Jonathan Sterne about his book MP3: The Meaning of a Format. You can read the introduction to his book, titled “Format …
This post is part of our ongoing NDSA innovation group’s Insights interview series. Scientific data is the biggest of the “big data.” In fact, research data and increased complexity and volume of data are two of the challenges addressed by the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship. To find out more about the data preservation and …
At the intersection of digital preservation, art conservation and folklore you can find many of Dragan Espenschied’s projects. After receiving feedback and input from Dragan for a recent post on interfaces to digital collections and geocities I heard that he is now stepping into the role of digital conservator at Rhizome. To that end, I’m …
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council and co-chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group. In the latest installment of the Insights Interviews series, a project of the Innovation Working Group of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, we talk with Andrew …
