This is a guest post from George Coulbourne, Executive Program Officer in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, Library of Congress. Braving the heat of an Indiana summer, 21 library, archive, and museum professionals recently completed the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program’s second Train-the-Trainer Workshop. Representing the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, …
In separate “big data” presentations at the Digital Preservation 2012 meeting, Myron Guttmann of the National Science Foundation and Leslie Johnston of the Library of Congress described scenarios that seemed futuristic and fantastic but were in fact present-day realities. Both presenters spoke about researchers using powerful new processing tools to distill information from massive pools …
Digital preservation’s many challenges (planning, choosing formats, metadata, storage, etc.), can be further complicated when dealing with multi-media cultural and arts materials. For example, music and dance performances that incorporate the digital may also include the element of chance, and can change with each performance. Or, maybe a piece of born digital artwork was created with several software programs that are already obsolete. …
We have noted earlier in this blog that digital preservation terminology is hard to pin down with precision. There are seemingly as many interpretations of “authenticity” and “repository” as there are digital preservation practitioners. Digital preservation as a concept actually has even more plasticity when viewed through the lens of popular culture. I did a …
“Do you remember how we did things back when your great great grandma or grandpa [were alive]? We had moved Native Americans from their homelands, so we could have more and more land for ourselves.” The above reference describes the Whitefish Middle School’s Montana Indian Tribes, Modern Life, 2010-2011 Web Archiving Collection. This unique collection, …
The following is a guest post by Emily Reynolds, a 2012 Junior Fellow. One of the many highlights of the DigitalPreservation 2012 conference last month was the Preserving Digital Culture panel, which featured speakers discussing the preservation of born-digital art and other creative output. While much of the conference addressed the often automated management of …
The following is a guest post from Meg Phillips, Electronic Records Lifecycle Coordinator for the National Archives and Records Administration. “What’s the bare minimum I can responsibly do with my electronic stuff?” was one of the central questions on the table at CurateCamp Processing. The unconference, focused on Processing Data / Processing Collections, was a …
The five recipients of the inaugural National Digital Stewardship Alliance innovation awards are exemplars of the creativity, diversity and collaboration essential to supporting the digital community as it works to preserve and make available digital materials. In an effort to learn more and share the work of the individuals, projects and institutions who won these …
The South By Southwest conference is has become pretty big on the tech circuit and has garnered a reputation as a place where new technologies are launched. There’s an egalitarian spirit to the event (read; sprawling) that encourages anyone to attend and participate. The “anyone” increasingly includes information professionals in libraries, archives and museums (LAMs). …
