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Category: Tools and Infrastructure

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Teaching Digital Library Creation with Viewshare

Posted by: Abbey Potter

This is a guest post from Camille Salas, an intern with the Library of Congress. As a first year graduate student at the University of Maryland’s School of Information, I, like many other library students across the country, enrolled in a required course that focused on the organization of information. I often referred to the …

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Imagine What We’ll Know This Time Next Week: An Interview with Bailey Smith and Anne Wootton of Pop Up Archive

Posted by: Trevor Owens

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. In this installment of the Insights Interviews series, a project of the Innovation Working Group of the …

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NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation: Release Candidate One

Posted by: Trevor Owens

In software development a release candidate is a beta version with the potential to be the final product.  Welcome to the release candidate for the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. After some fantastic commentary on the blog, and presentations at a series of conferences to solicit feedback, I’m excited to share this revised version of the levels for further …

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Preserving Digital Archaeological Data

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

This is a guest post by Leigh Anne Ellison, Sales and Marketing Coordinator, The Center for Digital Antiquity. I am excited for the opportunity to contribute a guest post here at The Signal. I work with The Center for Digital Antiquity, a collaborative non-profit organization devoted to enhancing preservation of and access to irreplaceable archaeological …

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Preserving.exe: A Short List of Readings on Software Preservation

Posted by: Trevor Owens

Most of the conversations I end up in about digital preservation are about the digital versions of analog things. Discussions of documents, still and moving images and audio recordings are important, but as difficult as the problems surrounding these kinds of digital objects are, there is a harder problem: preserving executable content, aka software. Software isn’t …

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SPRUCE-Up for Digital Preservation Community Engagement: An Interview with Paul Wheatley

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to talk (via email) with Paul Wheatley, of the SPRUCE Project,about an assortment of activities, issues and ideas relating to digital preservation. Leeds University Library is leading the Sustainable PReservation Using Community Engagement project, collaborating with the British Library, the Digital Preservation Coalition, the London School of Economics …

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Fixity and Fluidity in Digital Preservation

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

Kent Anderson offers a provocative post in The Mirage of Fixity — Selling an Idea Before Understanding the Concept.  Anderson takes Nicholas Carr to task for an article in the Wall Street Journal bemoaning the death of textual fixity.  Here’s a quote from Carr: Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change …

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Using Wayback Machine for Research

Posted by: Butch Lazorchak

The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group at the Library of Congress. Prompted by questions from Library of Congress staff on how to more effectively use web archives to answer research questions, I recently gave a presentation on “Using Wayback Machine for Research” (PDF). I …