In honor of this week’s Museum Computer Network conference, I want to talk a bit about the early history of museum computing. Most people are not aware that MCN was born out of a cooperative computing project in the New York City area in 1967, under the direction of Dr. Jack Heller. Fifteen New York-area …
On October 17, I had the extreme pleasure of hearing Cory Doctorow at the Library for talk entitled “A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond.” Not surprisingly, the room was packed with attentive listeners. The talk covered a wide range of topics–his love of books as physical objects and his background working in libraries and …
I am introducing a new occasional feature for my posts on this blog — a series called “Before You Were Born.” When I was an undergraduate and a graduate student at UCLA in the 1980s, one of my faculty mentors had been teaching there since 1950. His name was Albert Hoxie†, an historian who lavishly …
Not that repositories ever really were only about published scholarly output, but for some organizations that was the easiest first bar to reach. But at Open Repositories 2012, it was clear that the bar has been raised. OR2012, held at the University of Edinburgh from July 9-13, 2012, had over 480 registered attendees from over …
Some weeks ago I gave a presentation that I jokingly titled “The Challenges of Preserving Every Digital Format on the Face of the Planet.” Except it’s not really a joke. We often have little or no control over what comes into the Library of Congress Digital Collections, and we manage and preserve a wide variety …
Of late it seems that almost every project I have been called to work on involves some aspect of “Big Data.” I have been challenged in the past that libraries actually have big data, because we don’t as a general rule collect social science or scientific datasets. But I feel strongly in asserting that our …
In July 2011, Nicholas Taylor posted an entry to this blog about the amount of data transferred to the Library of Congress and the likely sources of some of the public perceptions of the size of the Library’s digital collections. And Matt Raymond of the Library posted an excellent overview of the size of the …
I first encountered Jason Scott in mid- to late-2010 through a colleague who informed that me that if I did not know who he was, that I had better learn. Since then I have become a big fan of his passion for digital archiving and his drive to save collections and content that few organizations …
Once upon a time, a big technology company wanted to get together a like-minded segment of its customers, those who worked at educational and memory institutions that were concerned about long-term preservation and best practices in digital archiving. Thus was born PASIG: the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group. Since 2007 there have been dozens …