The following is a guest post by 2025 Innovator in Residence Vivian Li, an illustrator, comics artist and web developer from Macomb, Illinois who currently lives in Seattle. As someone who has lived in both rural Illinois and bustling Seattle, I was shocked that I could find really cool items about both locations on the …
Earlier this year, the Library of Congress and our web harvest vendor MirrorWeb presented research on website archivability at the 2024 Web Archiving Conference at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The presentation was part of a panel called “Can we capture this?’: Assessing Website Archivability Beyond Trial and Error,” which was moderated by Martin Klein (Pacific …
This post is the most recent in a series about file format research for the Sustainability of Digital Formats site at the Library of Congress, including several new format descriptions as well as community collaborations.
The Library of Congress has published the 2024-2025 Recommended Formats Statement. Updates, all captured in a Change Log, include support for digital accessibility features as a criterion for evaluating digital formats, an FAQ to address user feedback and adjustments to preferred and accepted formats across multiple content categories.
The explosion of interest surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) will clearly have a tremendous impact on the world of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). The Library of Congress is exploring how certain AI use cases can help expand access to our collection, enhance services for users, and improve efficiency. We are still in the early …
The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) AudioVisual Working Group has returned to a schedule of two hybrid meetings a year, in addition to virtual working subgroup meetings as needed. In the past year, these meetings have include trips to the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and to the Smithsonian Library and Archives’ new Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI) digitization and processing space. This working group has also published new guidelines: Guidelines for IRENE System Products for Long Term Retention: Deliverable Packages for Imaged Audio Systems and Guidelines for Embedding Metadata in WebVTT Files. Recent work also included open-source software development and maintenance for BWF MetaEdit, FFmpeg, and vrecord. More exciting projects for 2024 are coming.
I’m excited to share this interview with Amanda Lehman, a Digital Collections Specialist in the Web Archiving Section at the Library. This interview, and others like it on The Signal, are created to generate insight into the background, experience, and interests of the people that support the Library of Congress. Tracee: Hi Amanda, could you tell us a bit about …
Technologist Ashley Blewer is using the format description document XML files to gather data across all FDDs. She has pulled this data into data visualization tools which allow us to see what categories our FDDs fall into and how many FDDs are being updated (by category, each year). These visualizations help the formats team to identify issues and streamline internal review and update processes.
The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) AudioVisual Working Group partnered with a consultant and accessibility firm on a project to enhance accessibility in open-source desktop applications for the digital preservation community. This blog post provides information on the applications tested, the issues found, and the technical guidelines and community recommendations to come out of this research.