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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 …