This is a guest post from Alice Prael, Digital Accessioning Archivist for Yale Special Collections at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. As digital storage technology progresses, many archivists are left with boxes of obsolete storage media, such as floppy disks and ZIP disks. These physical storage media plague archives that …
This is a guest post collectively written by the XFR Collective (pronounced “transfer collective”), a grass-roots digitization and digital-preservation organization. They work with artists and media creators to rescue and preserve digital works, utilizing open, free platforms — such as the Internet Archive — for long-term preservation and access. We featured them in two previous …
Researchers, of varying technical abilities, are increasingly applying data science tools and methods to digital collections. As a result, new ways are emerging for processing and analyzing the digital collections’ raw material — the data. For example, instead of pondering one single digital item at a time – such as a news story, photo or …
This is a guest post by John Scancella, Information Technology Specialist with the Library of Congress, and Tibaut Houzanme, Digital Archivist with the Indiana Archives and Records Administration. BagIt is an internationally accepted method of transferring files via digital containers. If you are new to BagIt, please watch our introductory video. Bagger is a digital …
Kim Milai, a retired school teacher, was searching on ancestry.com for information about her great grandfather, Amohamed Milai, when her browser turned up something she had not expected: a page from the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site displaying a scan of the Harrisburg Telegraph newspaper from March 13, 1919. On that page was a story …
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 …
When Kathleen O’Neill talks about digital collections, she slips effortlessly into the info-tech language that software engineers, librarians, archivists and other information technology professionals use to communicate with each other. O’Neill, a senior archives specialist in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, speaks with authority about topics such as file signatures, hex editors and checksums even …
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 …
Steven Puglia, manager of Digital Conversion Services at the Library of Congress, died peacefully on December 10, 2013 after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. Puglia had a profound effect on his colleagues here in Washington and worldwide, and there is a great outpouring of grief and appreciation in the wake of his passing. The …
