Apologies to Walt Whitman for co-opting the first line of his famous poem O Captain! My Captain! but solutions for archiving email are not yet anchor’d safe and sound. Thanks to the collaborative and cooperative community working in this space, however, we’re making headway on the journey. Email archiving as a distinct research area has …
The digital preservation community is a connected and collaborative one. I first heard about the Europe-based PREFORMA project last summer at a Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative meeting when we were discussing the Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting comparison matrix. My interest was piqued because I heard about their incorporation of FFV1 and Matroska, …
This post is co-authored with Erin Engle, a Digital Archivist in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Despite the occasional death knell claims, email is alive, well and exponentially thriving in many organizations. It’s become an increasingly complex challenge for collecting and memory institutions as we struggle with the same issues: How is email processed differently …
The end of the school year often finds me thinking about time gone by. What did I work on and what can I show for it? The NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group members were in the same frame of mind so we recently did a survey of our projects and accomplishments since the NDSA …
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. During the first week of October, Kate Murray and I participated in the annual conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives in Cape Town, South Africa. Kate’s blog describes the conference. This blog …
In this interview, part of the Insights Interview series, FADGI talks with Dave Rice and Devon Landes about the QCTools project. In a previous blog post, I interviewed Hannah Frost and Jenny Brice about the AV Artifact Atlas, one of the components of Quality Control Tools for Video Preservation, an NEH-funded project which seeks to …
The following is a guest post by Chris Prom, Assistant University Archivist and Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’ll never forget one lesson from my historical methods class at Marquette University. Ronald Zupko–famous for his lecture about the bubonic plague and a natural showman–was expounding on what it means to interrogate primary sources–to cast …
In response to a suggestion from our active membership, the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group recently hosted a discussion about preserving digital and software-based artworks. Interestingly, the suggestion for this topic came not from a museum staffer but by Winston Atkins, Preservation Officer at Duke University Libraries. Complex materials like digital art works and …
This blog post is co-authored by Carl Fleischhauer, Project Manager, Digital Initiatives, Library of Congress. People who manage audio and video files over time, do create fixity data, aka hash values or checksums, to help monitor the condition of those files in storage and when moved from one system or media to another system or …
