The NDSA levels of digital preservation are useful in providing a high-level, at-a-glance overview of tiered guidance for planning for digital preservation. One of the most common requests received by the NDSA group working on this is that we provide more in-depth information on the issues discussed in each cell. To that end, we are …
And if so, why would you ever want to? About a year ago the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections announced a rather exciting project, to digitize the data tapes from the Explorer I satellite mission. My first thought: the data on these tapes is likely digital to begin with, so there’s not really something …
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 …
A few weeks ago, as part of the Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation conference, an announcement was made of the beta launch of a new resource to catalog and describe digital preservation tools: Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry. The idea behind this registry is to try and consolidate all of the digital preservation tool …
If you’ve ever been to a warehouse store on a weekend afternoon, you’ve experienced the power of the sample. In the retail world, samples are an important tool to influence potential new customers who don’t want to invest in an unknown entity. I certainly didn’t start the day with lobster dip on my shopping list …
Open source software is playing an important role in digital stewardship. In an effort to better understand the role open source software is playing, the NDSA infrastructure working group is reaching out to folks working on a range of open source projects. Our goal is to develop a better understanding of their work and how they are …
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 …
A single photograph in a personal collection or archive might be represented by any number of derivative files of varying sizes, in varying formats, all with different sets of embedded metadata. At the bit level, all of the variations of the photograph are unique. However, in practice, a particular individual or organization might just be …
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 …