The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. This is the final blog on the topic of informational and artifactual values in the digitization of books (and other documents) and photographic negatives and transparencies. Here are links to the book-related blogs: Part 1 and Part 2. Part …
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. What does it mean to digitize a photographic negative? My previous pair of blogs discussed digitizing books (and other textual materials), exploring the ways that the process captures informational and artifactual aspects of the original item. The short version …
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. Yesterday, I blogged about the digital reformatting of historical books and other documents. I reported that virtually all digitization projects in memory institutions present the information from the pages in the form of a searchable text. I also noted …
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. How do you reproduce a book in digital form? This may seem like a simple question until you pick up a book and page through it. You may be struck by “how” in the methodological sense, knowing you need …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
