Many cultural institutions have accelerated the development of their digital collections and data sets by allowing citizen volunteers to help with the millions of crucial tasks that archivists, scientists, librarians, and curators face. One of the ways institutions are addressing these challenges is through crowdsourcing. In this post, I’ll look at a few sample crowdsourcing projects …
By early December 2014, a Congressional election year, newly elected Members of Congress were preparing for public service as outgoing Members were ending their public service and attending exit briefings. At an event sponsored by the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress, the December 3rd “Life After Congress” seminar, Robin Reeder, Archivist of the …
In June of this year, the Library of Congress announced a list of formats it would prefer for digital collections. This list of recommended formats is an ongoing work; the Library will be reviewing the list and making revisions for an updated version in June 2015. Though the team behind this work continues to put …
At the 2014 Society of American Archivists meeting, the CAD/BIM Taskforce held a session titled “Frameworks for the Discussion of Architectural Digital Data” to consider the daunting matter of archiving computer-aided design and Building Information Modelling files. This was the latest evidence that — despite some progress in standards and file exchange — the digital preservationist …
The human rights organization, witness.org, — who gave a presentation at Digital Preservation 2013 — just published The Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video. Though this guide is intended for human rights activists, it covers all aspects of digital video archiving so thoroughly that it is of value to anyone and everyone, from individuals archiving their …
Today’s guest post is by Carlos Martinez III, a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities intern in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. The National Information Standards Organization provides standards to help libraries, developers and publishers work together. Their report, A Framework Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections, is still as helpful to organizations today …
(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 …
While clearing out some personal clutter recently, I came across an old CD-ROM, published in 1989, that I always assumed was of great cultural value. Of course, when I tried to play it I got nothing but error messages and I set about finding a way to make it work. The CD-ROM is the Electronic …
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 …