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Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I was asked to present a talk today for an internal group at the Library of Congress based on my recent experiences participating in the Top Tech Trends panel at the 2014 American Library Association Midwinter meeting. It was suggested that I present a “Leslie-fied” version of the always-inspiring landscape talks that my colleague Cliff …
Posted in: Digital Content, Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
There was a week in January 2014 where I participated in three meetings/events where emulation came up as a digital preservation solution. Emulation has really hit its stride, 20 years after I first heard about it. An emulator is an environment that imitates the behavior of a computer or other electronic system. In recent years, …
Posted in: Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
Every year the Library of Congress hosts a meeting on Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections, aka the Preservation Storage Meeting. The 2013 meeting was held September 23-24, and featured an impressive array of presentations and discussions. The theme this year was standards. The term applies not just to media or to hardware, but to …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I am frequently asked about the difference between “traditional” preservation and digital preservation. My honest answer is that there are very few distinguishable differences. Preservation activities are never traditional – there is constant innovation in preservation techniques. Digital preservation is in many ways still developing its tools and techniques, but physical preservation is also evolving. …
Posted in: Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
A ten year-old recently asked what I do for a living. The response mostly involved explaining that the Library of Congress has digital collections and that I lead a team of people that take care of digital things, including writing software. I have often been asked by family, friends and complete strangers to explain what …
Posted in: Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
In May I was suffering from writer’s block and crowdsourced some topics for blog posts on Facebook. I got some very funny suggestions, many useful suggestions, and one that was both humorous and serious that kept sticking in my mind from my LC colleague Rosie Storey: “Digital content death cycle. Hoard, corrupt, abandon, neglect.” This …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On May 20-21, 2013, the Library of Congress hosted one in its series of small invitational digital content at-risk summits, this one on the topic of software preservation. “Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software” covered a wide range of topics around software preservation, every type of software and interactive media art and engaged multiple …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
Yesterday, May 9, 2013, the U.S. government issued an executive order and an open data policy mandating that federal agencies collect and publish new datasets in open, machine-readable, and, whenever possible, non-proprietary formats. The new policy gives agencies six months to create an inventory of all the government-produced datasets they collect and maintain; a list …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the 2013 CurateGear meeting held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on January 9, 2013. And what a good experience it was. CurateGear is a somewhat unique experience because it focuses not on presentations, but on demonstrations. LIVE demonstrations. Every presenter gives a …
Posted in: Digital Content, Education and Training, Tools and Infrastructure