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Posted by: Trevor Owens
While many kinds of analog media age with a kind of dignity, taking on a patina of age and the term “vintage,” the same is generally not true of digital media. Of the range of digital media out there, the humble rewritable CD is likely one of the least loved and most rapidly aging and …
Posted in: Digital Content, Insights Interview, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
The following is a guest post from Lee Nilsson, a National Digital Stewardship Resident working with the Repository Development Center at The Library of Congress. The 2014 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship makes a clear-cut case for the development of File Format Action Plans to combat format obsolescence issues. “Now that stewardship organizations are amassing large collections of digital …
Posted in: Education and Training, Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
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 …
Posted in: NDSA, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
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 they are …
Posted in: Insights Interview, NDSA, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content, NDSA, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
The following is a guest post from Raegan Swanson, Archivist with Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute. Reagan contacted members of the NDSA group working on the levels of digital preservation with her thoughts and comments and we were excited to offer her the opportunity to share her comments on the utility of the levels with a broader audience here on …
Posted in: NDSA, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
I’ve talked about Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work in a range of posts on digital objects here on The Signal. It seemed like it would be valuable to delve deeper into some of those discussions here in an interview. If you are unfamiliar, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University …
Posted in: Digital Content, Education and Training, NDSA, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
The following is a guest post from Megan Phillips, NARA’s Electronic Records Lifecycle Coordinator and an elected member of the NDSA coordinating committee and Andrea Goethals, Harvard Library’s Manager of Digital Preservation and Repository Services and co-chair of the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group. As part of the effort to publicize the NDSA Levels of …
Posted in: Digital Content, Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure