Today is the first day of the 2011 NDIIPP partners meeting. We are starting out with a bang: a keynote from Tim O’Reilly. Our other opening speakers are Siva Vaidhyanathan, Yancy Strickler, Micheal Edson and Aaron Presnall. When I think back to the first NDIIPP partners meeting six years ago, two opposing thoughts rattle my …
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. In an earlier post I talked about the types of Web content that the Library of Congress archives. Despite the tremendous amount we’ve preserved, we know we can’t do it alone. We often collaborate to build web …
The following is a guest post by Abbey Potter, Program Officer, NDIIPP, and Communications Officer, IIPC. You’ve no doubt heard this catch phrase made popular by Tim Gunn from the reality competition show Project Runway. It is the advice he gives harried contestants who are trying to create a fabulous dress in under two hours …
This is a map. Of course, it’s not just any map. It’s the Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes from 1507, otherwise known as the Waldseemüller map after its creator, Martin Waldseemüller. It was the first map, printed or manuscript, to depict clearly a separate Western Hemisphere, with the Pacific as …
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. Eleven years ago, the Library of Congress established a pilot web archiving project to study methods to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to and preserve at-risk born digital content for future generations. We could write a …
Enhanced access to historical resources drives the incentives to preserve. At least that’s the thinking behind the Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State Government Digital Information Project. The project, headed by the Minnesota Historical Society with state government partners in Arkansas, California, Illinois, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Tennessee and Vermont, …
When Andrea Goethals wants to escape the demands of her software engineering work at Harvard University library, she heads to the mountains of Maine. But not for pampered leisure. She and her husband volunteer with the Appalachian Mountain Club, maintaining a trail they’ve both adopted. They purge debris, drain water and remove massive obstacles. On …
The diaries of George Washington, the first map that used the name “America,” jazz recordings from the 1920s, pictures from presidential inaugurations—the Library of Congress has a very diverse collection of documents, recordings, pictures and maps that help us understand the story of our nation. Most discussions of saving cultural heritage information involve looking into …
There is a new collaboration under way, which is community driven, international in scope, and will be an invaluable resource for the entire digital library community. The “Unified Digital Formats Registry” is a project with the ambitious goal of providing online access and open information sharing for the entire range of digital format information. A …