By Butch Lazorchak and Trevor Owens We’ve talked in the past on the Signal on the need more applied research in digital preservation and stewardship. This is a key issue addressed by the 2014 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship, which dives in a little deeper to suggest that there’s a great need to strengthen the …
“Location is everywhere.” It’s become a catch phrase in mobile computing development and marketing, but it could just as easily become standard operating procedure in libraries, archives and museums as our content becomes increasingly geoenabled, using “location intelligence” to liberate our physical information from the confines of our walled spaces. Legislators, funders and planners have …
We’re lucky in the digital stewardship community that our challenges tend to be non life-threatening. Still, when we get fired up about something there is guaranteed to be spirited debate and passionate advocacy on all sides. Such was the case with the release of the PDF/A-3 file format specification in October 2012. We wrote about …
The 2014 National Digital Stewardship Agenda, released in July 2013, is still a must-read (have you read it yet?). It integrates the perspective of dozens of experts to provide funders and decision-makers with insight into emerging technological trends, gaps in digital stewardship capacity and key areas for development. The Agenda suggests a number of important …
The end of the year is a great time to take stock. I’m currently in the “have I done irrevocable damage to my body during the holiday snacking season” phase of stock-taking. Luckily, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance isn’t concerned with whether anyone’s going to eat that last cookie and has a higher purpose than …
The following is a guest post by report co-authors and NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group members: Winston Atkins, Duke University Libraries Andrea Goethals, Harvard Library Carol Kussmann, Minnesota State Archives Meg Phillips, National Archives and Records Administration Mary Vardigan, Inter‐university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) The results of the 2012 National Digital …
Those of us in the “cultural heritage” sector get used to being at the end of the line sometimes. With very few exceptions, the unique items that end up in our collections usually get here after all their primary value has been extracted. While we’d love to have a more regularized path for the treasures …
The following is a guest post from Michael Mastrangelo, a Program Support Assistant in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. During the Society of American Archivists Annual Conference in New Orleans in August, the NDIIPP-supported initiative Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP), received the prestigious Preservation Publication Award for 2013. …
In June I did a post highlighting segments of the digital stewardship universe that could use applied research attention. I looked at the “what” of email archiving here and the “how” of email archiving here and now I turn my attention to format migration. The need to migrate file formats arises out of concerns about …