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Category: Tools and Infrastructure

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Opportunity Knocks: Library of Congress Invites No-cost Digitization Proposals

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 …

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Opening Up the National Digital Newspaper Program

Posted by: Butch Lazorchak

The following is a guest post by David Brunton, a Supervisory Information Technology Specialist in the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress have partnered to enhance access to historic newspapers for many years with the National Digital Newspaper Program.  A centerpiece of this …

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The Metadata Games Crowdsourcing Toolset for Libraries & Archives: An Interview with Mary Flanagan

Posted by: Trevor Owens

I am excited to continue the NDSA innovation insights interview series to talk about the metadata games open source software project with Mary Flanagan. Mary is an artist, scholar and designer who holds the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and serves as the director of Tiltfactor Lab. While she is broadly …

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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 …