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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
Scientific data management has some buzz going. As a longtime data archivist/advocate this is a dream come true for me. I’ve pinched myself a couple of times to make sure it’s really happening. For decades, scientific practice focused attention on the published results of research. A substantial infrastructure supports this literature, including an article citation …
Continuing the alphabetical series of digital preservation topics. Recently one of our California partners commented on the irony of the earthquakes occurring in Colorado and Maryland, two partner sites in areas not prone to earthquakes. This practice of keeping copies of digital collections in geographically diverse areas is one technique employed for bit preservation. Fortunately …
The following is a guest post by Kate Zwaard, a Supervisory Information Technology Specialist in the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. I used to have a note on the wall of my office that said “get the records off the floor.” It reminded me that making sure the collections are safe comes first. …
