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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 …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
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 …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
A question popped up in the blogosphere recently. “Where is our Atlas of Digital Damages?” asked Barbara Sierman of the National Library of the Netherlands. She pointed out the amazement that would greet evidence of physical books, safely stored, with spontaneous and glaring changes in their content or appearance. “Panic would be huge if this …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Butch Lazorchak
As digital preservation and stewardship professionals, we approach digital objects from a unique perspective. We evaluate the long-term value of any particular digital object and work to develop a technical and social infrastructure that will enable us to successfully preserve the objects over time. Preserving and providing appropriate access are our primary functions, but no …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
I had the distinct pleasure of hearing about the on-going development of the free and open-source Archivematica digital preservation system twice this year. First, from Peter Van Garderen at the CurateGear conference and second from Courtney Mumma at a recent briefing on the project for staff at The Library of Congress. Peter and Courtney both …
Posted in: Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
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. As a recent blog post recounted, each year at the National Book Festival NDIIPP has a …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
In what we hope will become a regular feature here on The Signal I am excited to have a chance to chat with Lori Emerson, a representative from the newest member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. Lori is the Director of the Media Archaeology Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
The Library of Congress hosts a small annual meeting on preservation storage that brings vendors and the preservation community together to share points of view. The 2012 Designing Storage Architectures meeting was held on September 20-21, and as usual it was enlightening–and exciting. Two forms of large-scale storage have the largest amount of market share: …
Posted in: Outreach and Events, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Trevor Owens
The following is a guest post from Christie Moffatt an archivist in the History of Medicine Division and Program Manager of the Digital Manuscripts Program at the National Library of Medicine and Jennifer Marill, Chief of the Technical Services Division for NLM. The National Library of Medicine has a mandate to collect, preserve and make accessible the scholarly …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure