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Category: Tools and Infrastructure

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Islandora’s Open Source Ecosystem and Digital Preservation: An Interview with Mark Leggott

Posted by: Trevor Owens

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 …

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What Resolution Should I Use? Part 3

Posted by: Susan Manus

The following is a guest post by Barry Wheeler, Digital Projects Coordinator, Office of Strategic Initiatives. In Part 1 of this series, we examined how a simple scanner was built and showed how the manufacturer determined their claimed “resolution.”  We noted that the International Standards Organization calls this the “sampling rate” and defines resolution differently.  …

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“The Digital Data Backbone for the Study of Historical Places”: An Interview with Matt Knutzen of the New York Public Library

Posted by: Butch Lazorchak

The South By Southwest 2013 conference is coming up quickly and we’re getting excited for the numerous library/archive and museum activities that will be happening (look for an update on this year’s activities soon). One thing we know is happening is the panel we’re moderating on Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History.  Matthew A. …

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Archives, Materiality and the “Agency of the Machine”: An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst

Posted by: Trevor Owens

In this installment of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation working group’s series of interviews Lori Emerson of the Media Archaeology Lab interviews Wolfgang Ernst of Humboldt University in Berlin. The interview explores the relationship between media archaeology and digital preservation as evident in the design and structure of the Humbolt Media Archaeological Fundus. Lori: I deeply …

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Digital Forensic Perspective Helps Cultural Heritage Institutions Meet Deep Challenges

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 …

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Visualizations and Digital Collections

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council, National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group co-chair and a former Fellow in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. An affordance is a characteristic of an object or thing that supports a specific activity. For …

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Video Game Preservation at Scale: An Interview with Henry Lowood

Posted by: Trevor Owens

For a while now, Stanford University’s special collections have had the distinct honor of holding “one of the largest historical collections of interactive software in the world.” The Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing at Stanford University consists of several thousands of pieces of computer hardware and software. At a recent advisory …

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Is JPEG-2000 a Preservation Risk?

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

This is a guest post by Chris Adams, in the Repository Development Center, technical lead for the World Digital Library at the the Library of Congress. Like many people who work with digital imagery, I’ve been looking forward to the JPEG-2000 image format for a long time due to solid technical advantages: superior compression performance …