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Category: Publications and Resources

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Cultural Institutions Embrace Crowdsourcing

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

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 …

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Helping Congress Archive Their Personal Digital Files

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

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 …

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Untangling the Knot of CAD Preservation

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

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 …

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A New Guide for Archiving Digital Video

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

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 …

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Revisiting NISO’s “A Framework for Building Good Digital Collections”

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

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 …

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Preserving Creative America: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

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 …

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Profile: The National Library of New Zealand

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 …