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Posted by: Leslie Johnston
My colleague Trevor Owens wrote a great blog post entitled “What Do you Mean by Archive?” This led to a follow-up discussion where I publicly announced on Facebook that I wanted to write about the term “curation.” Its seemingly widespread use in popular culture in the past 4-5 years has fascinated me. Every time I …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
After reading a great post by the Smithsonian Institution Archives on Archiving Family Traditions, I started thinking about my own activities as a steward of my and my family’s digital life. I give myself a “C” at best. Now, I am not a bad steward of my own digital life. I make sure there are …
Posted in: Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
This past weekend I got to do one of my favorite things of the year: work at the NDIIPP Digital Preservation booth at the 2013 National Book Festival. Why is it one of my favorite things to do each year? Because I get to hear from real people about what their personal digital preservation issues …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On May 20-21, 2013, the Library of Congress hosted one in its series of small invitational digital content at-risk summits, this one on the topic of software preservation. “Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software” covered a wide range of topics around software preservation, every type of software and interactive media art and engaged multiple …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I was talking to one of my archivist colleagues about a collection he was processing and the challenges he was having identifying file types based on their extensions. The collection does go back several decades, but some of the file extensions were unrecognizable. This was when I confessed: during a period of time in my …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On November 12, 2012, my home was broken into and robbed. I lost jewelry, some vintage tech (my beloved 1993 Mac Duo 230 laptop), and, more importantly, my netbook that I use for all my personal computing. I have learned a lot of lessons from that experience. First, I am very glad that I have …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On October 17, I had the extreme pleasure of hearing Cory Doctorow at the Library for talk entitled “A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond.” Not surprisingly, the room was packed with attentive listeners. The talk covered a wide range of topics–his love of books as physical objects and his background working in libraries and …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I first encountered Jason Scott in mid- to late-2010 through a colleague who informed that me that if I did not know who he was, that I had better learn. Since then I have become a big fan of his passion for digital archiving and his drive to save collections and content that few organizations …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On a recent trip I visited a funky vintage store to see if anything caught my eye. While I was easily able to keep myself from buying any jewelry or taxidermy, I came across a number of displays of family photographs available for sale. Not only were there bowls of loose photos, there was a …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving