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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
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
On May 20-21, 2013, the Library of Congress hosted one in its series of small invitational digital content at-risk summits, this one on the topic of software preservation. “Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software” covered a wide range of topics around software preservation, every type of software and interactive media art and engaged multiple …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
Yesterday, May 9, 2013, the U.S. government issued an executive order and an open data policy mandating that federal agencies collect and publish new datasets in open, machine-readable, and, whenever possible, non-proprietary formats. The new policy gives agencies six months to create an inventory of all the government-produced datasets they collect and maintain; a list …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
Image scanning of one sort or another has been in common usage in some industries since the 1920s. Yes, really, the 1920s. The news wire services used telephotography — where images are captured using photo cells and transmitted over phone lines — well into the 1990s. Scanners and digital cameras like those we are familiar …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
This past April 8 was the 2013 “Day of Digital Humanities.” Started in 2010, this is an annual event of blogging and tweeting about the experience of digital humanities by graduate students, professors, alt-academics, librarians and other participants who identify with the field. And “the field” of Digital Humanities can be whatever you define it …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events