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Posted by: Leslie Johnston
My colleague Trevor Owens wrote a great blog post entitled “What Do you Mean by Archive?” This led to a follow-up discussion where I publicly announced on Facebook that I wanted to write about the term “curation.” Its seemingly widespread use in popular culture in the past 4-5 years has fascinated me. Every time I …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On Sunday, March 2, I had the opportunity to attend an OpenNews Hack Day event at the Newseum in Washington DC, sponsored by Knight-mozilla OpenNews, PopUp Archive, and the Newseum. The event was held in conjunction with the NICAR (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) conference on working with datasets and developing interactive applications in journalism. …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I was asked to present a talk today for an internal group at the Library of Congress based on my recent experiences participating in the Top Tech Trends panel at the 2014 American Library Association Midwinter meeting. It was suggested that I present a “Leslie-fied” version of the always-inspiring landscape talks that my colleague Cliff …
Posted in: Digital Content, Inside the Library, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
In my work at the Library, one of my larger projects has to do with the acquisition and preservation of eserials. By this I don’t mean access to licensed and hosted eserials, but the acquisition and preservation of eserial article files that come to the Library. In many ways, this is just like other acquisition …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I increasingly deal with vintage hardware. Why? Because we have vintage media in our collections that we need to read to make preservation and access copies of the files stored on them. I spend a lot of time thinking about hardware that I have interacted with and managed over the years. Some of it was …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I was staring at a blank screen when my colleague David came into my office. I semi-jokingly asked him for a blog topic. “I have one for you,” he replied. “Content Archaeology. Discuss.” And with that he left my office. People know that I trained as an archaeologist and did fieldwork in multiple locations. I …
Posted in: Digital Content, Publications and Resources
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I have had two conversation recently — one an intern and one with a friend outside our community — about my career path, and career paths in general around digital preservation. Paraphrasing, well, everyone (who may not know they are quoting the game Colossal Cave Adventure from 1976), it was a maze of twisty little …
Posted in: Digital Content, Education and Training
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
In May I was suffering from writer’s block and crowdsourced some topics for blog posts on Facebook. I got some very funny suggestions, many useful suggestions, and one that was both humorous and serious that kept sticking in my mind from my LC colleague Rosie Storey: “Digital content death cycle. Hoard, corrupt, abandon, neglect.” This …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
My first foray into online communities was in the mid- to late-1980s, when the organization I worked for got some of its online services through UCLA. We got limited access to email and access to the Usenet discussion system. If you’re not familiar with Usenet — which went live in 1980 — surprise! It’s still …
Posted in: Digital Content