This is part two of the Content Matters interview series interview with Diane Papineau, a geographic information systems analyst at the Montana State Library. Part one was yesterday, December 5, 2013. Butch: What are some of the biggest digital preservation and stewardship challenges you face at the Montana State Library? Diane: The two biggest challenges …
“What happens at BPE stays at BPE.” So goes the oft-repeated mantra at the annual Best Practices Exchange conference, held this year under mostly-sunny skies in beautiful downtown Salt Lake City, UT. The phrase holds a special meaning for BPE attendees. Unlike the reticent returnees from America’s sin capitol who have presumably have something to …
Those of us in the “cultural heritage” sector get used to being at the end of the line sometimes. With very few exceptions, the unique items that end up in our collections usually get here after all their primary value has been extracted. While we’d love to have a more regularized path for the treasures …
Digital mapping information is an essential part of the backbone of our economy through the now-widespread consumer applications that allow us to track our location, find a nearby restaurant or guide us on a journey. While largely invisible to the casual user, the geospatial data that underpins these applications allows us to know what our …
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Library of Congress Web Archiving Team Lead and NDSA Content Working Group Co-Chair. Are you or your employer involved in archiving web content? If so, you may be interested in the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s (NDSA) 2nd biannual survey of U.S. organizations that are actively involved …
I was at a recent meeting of the Federal Geographic Data Committeee’s Coordination Group and Anne Castle, the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science in the Department of the Interior and the co-chair of the FGDC Steering Committee, was discussing the challenges of finding resources to support geospatial activity. The federal geospatial community is working …
In early July I wrote about the “what” of email archiving. That is, “what” are we trying to preserve when we say we’re “preserving email.” It was admittedly a cursory look at the issue, but hopefully it’s a start for more thorough discussions down the road. This time I’ll dig in a little deeper and …
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the need for applied digital preservation research. The post generated a number of great comments and I’ll take some time over the next few months to dig a little deeper into each subject area and try and tease out where the useful efforts are, while also identifying …
A few months back, during the Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference, I was struck by how much interesting research was being done in the field of digital preservation. Everything from digital forensics to gamification, all of it thoughtful, much of it very practical and applicable. Still, I couldn’t help wishing that there was even more …