And if so, why would you ever want to? About a year ago the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections announced a rather exciting project, to digitize the data tapes from the Explorer I satellite mission. My first thought: the data on these tapes is likely digital to begin with, so there’s not really something …
The following is a guest post from Nicole Saylor, the head of the American Folklife Center‘s archives at the Library of Congress. Prior to her arrival at the Library, she was a member of the survey team while working as the head of Digital Research & Publishing at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s easy …
The following is a guest post from Jane Mandelbaum, co-chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working group and IT Project Manager at the Library of Congress. As part of our ongoing series of insights discussions with individuals doing innovative work related to digital preservation and stewardship I am excited to talk with Brian Schmidt. Brian …
Our world increasingly runs on software. From operating streetlights and financial markets, to producing music and film, to conducting research and scholarship in the sciences and the humanities, software shapes and structures our lives. Software is simultaneously a baseline infrastructure and a mode of creative expression. It is both the key to accessing and making …
A single photograph in a personal collection or archive might be represented by any number of derivative files of varying sizes, in varying formats, all with different sets of embedded metadata. At the bit level, all of the variations of the photograph are unique. However, in practice, a particular individual or organization might just be …
I’ve talked about Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work in a range of posts on digital objects here on The Signal. It seemed like it would be valuable to delve deeper into some of those discussions here in an interview. If you are unfamiliar, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University …
The following is a guest post from Megan Phillips, NARA’s Electronic Records Lifecycle Coordinator and an elected member of the NDSA coordinating committee and Andrea Goethals, Harvard Library’s Manager of Digital Preservation and Repository Services and co-chair of the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group. As part of the effort to publicize the NDSA Levels of …
A few months back several members of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Levels of Digital Preservation team presented a short paper at Archiving 2013, The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation: An Explanation and Uses. While the Levels of Digital Preservation will continue to be refined and improved we are thrilled to report that they are …
In The Is of the Digital Object and the is of the Artifact I explored the extent to which digital objects confound and complicate some of our conceptions of what exactly digital things are. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the nature of digital objects offers an important opportunity for the cultural heritage community to consider …