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Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
The collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum include recorded accounts from people who experienced one of the most horrific events in history. And, by the very nature of these interviews, the Museum faces a unique challenge: the last of the potential interviewees are aging and dying. Time is running out and opportunities to record …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Trevor Owens
The following interview is a guest post from Jose (Ricky) Padilla, an intern with the NDIIPP program working on issues related to software preservation and the innovation and infrastructure working groups of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. In this installment of the Insights Interviews Series I interview Dr. Leonardo Flores, Professor of English at El …
Posted in: Digital Content, Insights Interview, NDSA
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
We digital archivists warn about the risk of losing data with the assumption that the threat of loss is enough to stir people to action. But while most everyone has their own experience with data loss, people have a way of tucking past pain away rather than remaining hyper-vigilant about something similar happening again. Or …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Tess Webre, an intern with NDIIPP at the Library of Congress. In a recent meeting, some colleagues and I discussed the age in which individuals should start understanding the basics of digital preservation. I suggested that, with children creating digital files earlier and earlier, it should be taught …
Posted in: Digital Content, Education and Training
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
Digitization–making a digital copy of a non-digital object–is a bedeviling topic for digital preservationists. Establishing a clear line of demarcation between the process of creating the digital copy and the process of keeping the copy over time is the central issue. I’ve always thought this was semantics. Well-meaning, but ill-informed, people said “digital preservation” when …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
This is a guest post by Emily Reynolds, a former Library of Congress Junior Fellow and recent Alternative Spring Break intern. Last week, as part of the University of Michigan School of Information’s Alternative Spring Break program, I worked on a project to develop web archiving use cases for the International Internet Preservation Consortium. The …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Leslie Johnston
I was talking to one of my archivist colleagues about a collection he was processing and the challenges he was having identifying file types based on their extensions. The collection does go back several decades, but some of the file extensions were unrecognizable. This was when I confessed: during a period of time in my …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder
Lisa Weber is in the home stretch, heading toward her retirement from the National Archives and from a lifetime of facilitating change for the public good. One striking aspect of her long career is that she began as a traditional archivist and morphed into a hybrid of archivist, librarian and information technologist — a species …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Barry Wheeler, Digital Projects Coordinator, Office of Strategic Initiatives. In Part 1 of this series, we examined how a simple scanner was built and showed how the manufacturer determined their claimed “resolution.” We noted that the International Standards Organization calls this the “sampling rate” and defines resolution differently. …
Posted in: Digital Content, Personal Archiving, Tools and Infrastructure