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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
