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Category: Digital Content

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Providing Access to 70 Million Copyright Records

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

This is a guest post from Mike Burke from the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. The U.S. Copyright Office has a comprehensive set of records about books, periodicals, music, motion pictures and other works that were registered with the Office between 1870 and 1977.  The records include transfers and assignments of rights …

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Crowdsourcing the Civil War: Insights Interview with Nicole Saylor

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. I’m excited to offer this fourth interview for Insights, an occasional feature sharing interviews and conversations between National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group members and individuals involved with projects related to preservation, access and stewardship of digital …

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The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 2

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. A previous post suggested how the digital environment within computer programs and systems creates an artifactual element to born-digital records. An analog equivalent to this idea can be found in the popular Thomas Jefferson’s Library exhibit …

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Digital Preservation and the 1963 Kennedy Assassination Study

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

Events associated with the Kennedy assassination offer a compelling case study regarding obsolete data formats and digital preservation. Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy on this day 48 years ago, an organization turned to the latest computer technology in an effort to study the tragedy.  From November 26 through December 3, 1963, the National …

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Unbreaking News You Can Use: The National Digital Newspaper Program

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post by David Brunton, a Supervisory Information Technology Specialist in the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. I have heard the National Digital Newspaper Program jokingly described as “putting breaking new online, within 200 years.”  In some ways, it’s a fitting tag line: the most current newspaper pages released …

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Growing Open Source Communities: Omeka, End Users, Designers and Developers

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

The following is a guest post from Sharon M. Leon, Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Associate Professor at George Mason University. Historians are not the most likely candidates to design and develop an open source web publishing platform. But, as historians working at in the …

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Information or Artifact: Digitizing Photographic Negatives and Transparencies, Part 2

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

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 …

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Information or Artifact: Digitizing Photographic Negatives and Transparencies, Part 1

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

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 …

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Information or Artifact: Digitizing a Book, Part 2

Posted by: Bill LeFurgy

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 …