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Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
We hear a constant stream of news about how crunching massive data collections will change everything from soup to nuts. Here on The Signal, it’s fair to say that scientific research data is close to the heart of our hopes, dreams and fears when it comes to big data: we’ve written over two-dozen posts touching on …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
This is a guest post by Paul Wheatley of the SPRUCE Project, which is “aiming to foster a vibrant and self-supporting community of digital preservation practitioners and developers via a mixture of online interaction and face to face events.” For more on SPRUCE, see an earlier interview with Paul. A significant proportion of the project I’m currently …
Posted in: Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
This is a Guest Post by Abbie Grotke, the Library of Congress Web Archiving Team Lead and Co-Chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Content Working Group. We’re excited to finally announce something a team of Library staff has been involved with for over a year now – a big project to integrate the Library’s web archives …
Posted in: Digital Content, Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
I started writing before computers were commonly available. But, unlike some who are nostalgic for the era of pen and ink, I feel only joy about relying on machines in my struggle to communicate with written language. My handwriting was inelegant from the start. I never bothered to ask if neatness counted, because it didn’t …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
My colleague Leslie Johnston blogged last week about computer hardware preservation and declared a change of opinion on the subject. Her motivation came as a result of discussions at a recent Library of Congress invitational meeting, Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software. I attended the same meeting and also changed my opinion–but in the …
Posted in: Inside the Library, Outreach and Events, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
The perfect digital preservation system does not exist. It may someday, but I don’t expect to live to see it. Instead, people and organizations are working on iterations of systems, and system components, that are gradually improving how we steward digital content over time. This concept of perpetual beta has been around for a while; …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Data Specialist for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. A previous post on this blog explored why it’s so hard to come up with a reliable measurement of the average lifespan of a webpage. In essence, the argument came down to this: links and the …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
This is a guest post from Vidya Vish, The Library of Congress Contracting Officer for the Third Party Digitization RFP. The Library’s collections include tens of millions of items – not just books, but also manuscripts, monographs, serials, newspapers, pamphlets, sound recordings, films, videos, sheet music, photographs, posters, microfilm and maps. Our collections are at …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
This is a guest post by Jose “Ricky” Padilla, a HACU intern working with NDIIPP. “There are some deep challenges ahead for cultural heritage and archives, but the forensic perspective is undoubtedly among the most promising sources of insights and solutions. Equally, digital forensics can benefit from the advances being made in the curation and …
Posted in: Tools and Infrastructure