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Category: Publications and Resources

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Data Infrastructure, Education & Sustainability: Notes from the Symposium on the Interagency Strategic Plan for Big Data

Posted by: Trevor Owens

Last week, the  National Academies Board on Research Data and Information hosted a Symposium on the Interagency Strategic Plan for Big Data. Staff from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Institute for Standards and Technology presented on ongoing work to establish an interagency strategic plan …

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We Want You Just the Way You Are: The What, Why and When of Fixity

Posted by: Trevor Owens

Fixity, the property of a digital file or object being fixed or unchanged, is a cornerstone of digital preservation. Fixity information, from simple file counts or file size values to more precise checksums and cryptographic hashes, is data used to verify whether an object has been altered or degraded. Many in the preservation community know …

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Curating Extragalactic Distances: An interview with Karl Nilsen & Robin Dasler

Posted by: Trevor Owens

While a fair amount of digital preservation focuses on objects that have clear corollaries to objects from our analog world (still and moving images and documents for example), there are a range of forms that are basically natively digital. Completely native digital forms, like database-driven web applications, introduce a variety of challenges for long-term preservation …

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Protect Your Data: Information Security and the Boundaries of your Storage System

Posted by: Trevor Owens

The following is a guest post from Jane Mandelbaum, co-chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working group and IT Project Manager at the Library of Congress. The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation are useful in providing a high-level, at-a-glance overview of tiered guidance for planning for digital preservation. One of the most common requests received …

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Protect Your Data: File Fixity and Data Integrity

Posted by: Trevor Owens

The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council, National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group co-chair and a former Fellow in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. Here on The Signal, members of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation team have been providing some …

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Preserving.exe Report: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software

Posted by: Trevor Owens

Our world increasingly runs on software. From operating streetlights and financial markets, to producing music and film, to conducting research and scholarship in the sciences and the humanities, software shapes and structures our lives. Software is simultaneously a baseline infrastructure and a mode of creative expression. It is both the key to accessing and making …

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Digital Studies Fellowship Opportunity at the Library of Congress

Posted by: Trevor Owens

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress has announced a new set of Kluge Fellowship in Digital Studies to examine the impact of the digital revolution on society, culture and international relations using the Library’s collections and resources. I am thrilled to have the chance to talk with Jason Steinhauer, Program Specialist …

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What’s a Nice English Professor Like You Doing in a Place Like This: An Interview With Matthew Kirschenbaum

Posted by: Trevor Owens

I’ve talked about Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work in a range of posts on digital objects here on The Signal. It seemed like it would be valuable to delve deeper into some of those discussions here in an interview. If you are unfamiliar, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University …

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What Would You Call the Last Row of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation?

Posted by: Trevor Owens

The following is a guest post from Megan Phillips, NARA’s Electronic Records Lifecycle Coordinator and an elected member of the NDSA coordinating committee and Andrea Goethals, Harvard Library’s Manager of Digital Preservation and Repository Services and co-chair of  the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group.  As part of the effort to publicize the NDSA Levels of …