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Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
I started writing before computers were commonly available. But, unlike some who are nostalgic for the era of pen and ink, I feel only joy about relying on machines in my struggle to communicate with written language. My handwriting was inelegant from the start. I never bothered to ask if neatness counted, because it didn’t …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
A smart-alecky way to answer the question in the title above would be: “why everything, of course.” But we don’t traffic in snark here, at least not intentionally. User expectations influence so much of what stewardship organizations do. We collect and preserve all content primarily to support use, but the issue is especially important in …
Posted in: Digital Content
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Data Specialist for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. A previous post on this blog explored why it’s so hard to come up with a reliable measurement of the average lifespan of a webpage. In essence, the argument came down to this: links and the …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
This is a guest post from Vidya Vish, The Library of Congress Contracting Officer for the Third Party Digitization RFP. The Library’s collections include tens of millions of items – not just books, but also manuscripts, monographs, serials, newspapers, pamphlets, sound recordings, films, videos, sheet music, photographs, posters, microfilm and maps. Our collections are at …
Posted in: Digital Content, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
This is a guest post by Susan Garfinkel, research specialist, Digital Reference Section at the Library of Congress. Electronic literature—past, future and present—is the focus of a free three-day program at the Library of Congress, April 3 to 5. The Electronic Literature Showcase, sponsored by the Library’s Digital Reference Section, includes a variety of events designed …
Posted in: Digital Content, Inside the Library, Outreach and Events
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
The following is a guest post by Jennifer Clark, an NDIIPP intern from the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science. I came to NDIIPP expecting to hear that institutions and the public weren’t prioritizing digital preservation, and that the next wave of librarians would need to shout from the rooftops to raise awareness …
Posted in: Digital Content, Education and Training
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: 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