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. …
The following is a guest post by Barrie Howard, Program Management Coordinator, NDIIPP. In my work at NDIIPP I’ve been looking at U.S. government grant programs that have funded digital preservation since 2000. I discovered that funding has been sourced primarily from the Library of Congress and four other agencies: the Institute of Museum and …
The following is a guest post by Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. We are happy to announce the full open source release of the Recollection software platform. Briefly, Recollection is a web application that enables librarians, archivists, curators, and historians to create dynamic interfaces to cultural heritage collections. If you …
The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group. Though presented as a unified experience, a website depends on many interrelated parts: document markup and dynamic code, assorted binary file types, software interpreters and platforms. The challenge of web archive preservation planning is to save this experience, …
Technology is the easy part of digital preservation. Actually it’s only easy relative to the other challenges that libraries, archives and other memory institutions face in keeping and serving digital content. The really hard stuff comes down to people: how staff are organized, empowered and trained to do the work. I see two basic issues …
