Top of page

Category: Digital Content

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

What are We Going to do About Hardware?

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 …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Open Data and Preservation

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 …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Digital Humanities and Digital Preservation

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 …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Community Building is What it’s All About

Posted by: Leslie Johnston

I was exceptionally honored to be asked to give the opening keynote for code4lib 2013, one of the key meetings for library technologists.  People may have thought that I would speak about, well, coding, or repository development, or online tools or even digital preservation. But I didn’t. I talked about community building. The code4lib community …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Before You Were Born: We Were Digitizing Texts

Posted by: Leslie Johnston

We are all pretty familiar with the process of scanning texts to produce page images and converting them using optical character recognition to full-text indexing and searching. But electronic texts have a far older-pedigree. Text digitization in the cultural heritage sector started in earnest in 1971, when the first Project Gutenberg text — the United …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

When Data Loss is Personal

Posted by: Leslie Johnston

On November 12, 2012, my home was broken into and robbed. I lost jewelry, some vintage tech (my beloved 1993 Mac Duo 230 laptop), and, more importantly, my netbook that I use for all my personal computing. I have learned a lot of lessons from that experience. First, I am very glad that I have …