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Category: Tools and Infrastructure

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Data is the New Black

Posted by: Leslie Johnston

At our recent Preservation Storage Meeting, the word “data” was frequently mentioned.  This was of some note to me, as cultural heritage organizations have, until recently, spoken of “collections” and “content” or even “files,” but not data.  This is of course not the case at universities, where social science and observational datasets are very much …

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“Neighborhood Watch” for Repository Quality Assurance

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post from Stephen Abrams Associate Director, UC Curation Center/California Digital Library. Stephen recently represented an action team from NDSA innovation working group in a presentation on this idea at the Designing Storage Architectures for Preservation Collections meeting. His slides from that talk are available online (PDF). During the recent meeting …

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Digital Preservation-Friendly File Formats for Scanned Images

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

From a preservation standpoint, some digital file formats are better than others.  The basic issue is how readable a format remains over the course of time and successive waves of technological change.  The ideal format will convey its content accurately regardless of advances in hardware, software and other aspects of information technology. Over the last …

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Digital Preservation Pioneer: Helen Tibbo

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

Helen Tibbo is a descendant of Mayflower settlers Miles Standish and John Alden but she doesn’t flaunt her pedigree or socialize exclusively with snooty blue bloods. It’s difficult to say exactly how her Massachusetts cultural roots have defined her but she does embody bedrock New England characteristics such as self-reliance and practicality. And these traits …

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I Love This Meeting: Preservation Storage, in All its Glory

Posted by: Leslie Johnston

One of our annual highlights is The Storage Meeting, which brings together digital preservation practitioners and data storage vendors to have an open discussion.  We held this year’s meeting, Designing Storage Architectures for Preservation Collections,  during September 26-27, in Washington DC. Over 100 archivists and librarians, computer scientists, IT professionals and storage vendors participated.  This …

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Simple, Weak, Scalable and Open: Concepts to Live by in Developing New Solutions

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The 2011 Annual Summer Meeting of DataCite, brought data lovers from several nations to Berkeley, CA, recently. A celebration of access and preservation ensued, with communal sharing of case studies, best practices and ideas for future work. DataCite is an organization with members from national libraries and other organizations from around the world that are …

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Toward a Library of Virtual Machines: Insights interview with Vasanth Bala and Mahadev Satyanarayanan

Posted by: Susan Manus

The following is a guest post by Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. We are excited to continue our Insights series of interviews, featuring conversations between National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation working group members and individuals working on projects related to preservation, access and stewardship of digital information. In this installment, Jane …

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Lessons Learned for Sustainable Open Source Software for Libraries, Archives and Museums

Posted by: Butch Lazorchak

We are excited to share this guest post from MacKenzie Smith, Research Director at the MIT Libraries. At the joint NDIIPP/NDSA meeting this summer MacKenzie gave a talk titled “Exhibit3@MIT: Lessons learned from 10 years of the Simile Project for building library open source software” in our session on open source tools and communities. The …

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Family History and Digital Preservation, part 1

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

The popularity of genealogy websites and TV shows is rapidly growing, mainly because the Internet has made it so convenient to access family history information. Almost everything can be done through the computer now. Before the digital age, genealogical research was not only laborious and time consuming, it also resulted in boxes of documents: photos, …