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Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
In 1971, Gary Marchionini had an epiphany about educational technology when he found himself competing with teletype machines for his students’ attention. Marchionini was teaching mathematics at a suburban Detroit junior high school the year that the school acquired four new teletype machines. The machines were networked to a computer, so a user could type …
Posted in: Partners and Collaboration
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Over the past year, Howard Besser and Activist Archivists have been doing innovative work that extends beyond the technological aspects of digital preservation to include elements of sociology, cultural sensitivity, local politics, community advocacy and more. Their work centers around a new kind of collection that didn’t exist until recent years: digital content on a massive …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Listen to the podcast interview. Anne Van Camp, director of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, radiates exuberance about her work. You would think she won the lottery. Van Camp is a historian by training and an archivist by circumstance. She began her career at Chase Manhattan Bank as an archives manager, went on to Stanford’s Hoover …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
(NOTE: This is a reprinted and updated article from our digitalpreservation.gov website.) The motion picture industry is rapidly changing from film to digital media and within the next decade most movies will be shot, edited, distributed and projected digitally. Yet even as the industry embraces new technology, they may not be doing enough to archive …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
This article is reprinted by request from the digitalpreservation.gov website. While the saying “New Zealand is far from everywhere” may be true, distance is not an issue regarding its digital cultural collections and how efficiently the National Library of New Zealand makes them available over the Internet. For a small country (population approximately 4,393,500 as …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Helen Tibbo is a descendant of Mayflower settlers Miles Standish and John Alden but she doesn’t flaunt her pedigree or socialize exclusively with snooty blue bloods. It’s difficult to say exactly how her Massachusetts cultural roots have defined her but she does embody bedrock New England characteristics such as self-reliance and practicality. And these traits …
Posted in: Education and Training, Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
In part 1 of this article, I wrote that relational databases are the engines that drive digital genealogy. Databases make it possible to quickly search through enormous quantities of records, find the person you’re looking for and discover related people and events. And when institutions collaborate and share databases, statistical information becomes enriched. For example, …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
The popularity of genealogy websites and TV shows is rapidly growing, mainly because the Internet has made it so convenient to access family history information. Almost everything can be done through the computer now. Before the digital age, genealogical research was not only laborious and time consuming, it also resulted in boxes of documents: photos, …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Personal Archiving, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
“The Library of Congress,” a 20-minute motion picture from the 1940s, is not only a loving homage to the Library, rich with Hollywood production values, but it is also associated with a few significant nodes in history: World War II, the creation of the Library’s motion picture archives and the population of cyberspace with cultural …
Posted in: Digital Content, Inside the Library, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources, Videos and Podcasts