The news is often called the “first draft of history” and preserved newspapers are some of the most used collections in libraries. The Internet and other digital technologies have altered the news landscape. There have been numerous stories about the demise of the newspaper and disruption at traditional media outlets. We’ve seen more than a …
The following is a guest post by Meghan Banach Bergin, Bibliographic Access and Metadata Coordinator, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. On October 30th, the second New England Regional National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NE NDSA) meeting was held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. The meeting was generously sponsored by the Five Colleges Digital Preservation …
As part of a larger effort to explore file formats, the Born Digital Video subgroup of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group is pleased to announce the release of a new four-part report, “Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video.” This report has already undergone review by FADGI members and invited colleagues including …
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. FADGI format comparison projects. The Audio-Visual Working Group within the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative recently posted a comparison of a few selected digital file formats for consideration when reformatting videotapes. We sometimes call these …
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. During the first week of October, Kate Murray and I participated in the annual conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives in Cape Town, South Africa. Kate’s blog describes the conference. This blog …
Upon seeing the Cape of Good Hope near Cape Town, South Africa, for the first time in 1580, Sir Francis Drake wrote in his diary that “this cape is the most stately thing and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth” And I have to say that I agree. In …
The following is a guest post by Chris Prom, Assistant University Archivist and Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’ll never forget one lesson from my historical methods class at Marquette University. Ronald Zupko–famous for his lecture about the bubonic plague and a natural showman–was expounding on what it means to interrogate primary sources–to cast …
In a previous blog post, the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group announced the opening of a survey to rank issues in preserving video collections. The survey closed on August 2, 2014 and while there’s work ahead to analyze the results and develop action plans, we can share some preliminary findings. We purposely cast a …
I had the distinct pleasure of moderating the opening plenary session of the Joint Annual Meeting of COSA, NAGARA and SAA in Washington D.C. in early August. The panel was on the “state of access,” and I shared the dais with David Cuillier, an Associate Professor and Director of the University of Arizona School of …