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Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
Getting emotional about historical collections is unusual for most people. Ask the average person to free associate words for “archives” and your will hear “dusty, “old,” “dark” and so on. Ask about digital archives and you will likely just get a blank stare. This is an occupational hazard of digital archivists, that awkward first attempt to …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
You should have an archive for your personal digital materials. We all should. Archives preserve memories of “me” as well as “us.” Our personal archives also offer exciting new ways to remember and reconstruct our lives. Attendees of the Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference considered these ideas over two days of presentations and discussion last …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events, Personal Archiving
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council, National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group co-chair and a former Fellow in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. An affordance is a characteristic of an object or thing that supports a specific activity. For …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
I had the opportunity today to talk at the Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information symposium at the Georgetown University Law Center. The event marked the 125th anniversary of the University Law Library. My panel was on Big Data Applications in Scholarship and Policy, and I was pleased to present with …
Posted in: Digital Content, Outreach and Events
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
With 2012 safely behind us, let us praise some of the best things that happened last year in digital preservation. This is something of a tradition for us, as we have previously run down a list for 2011 and 2010. I cast a wide net and mustered my objectivity in in picking activities with the …
Posted in: Digital Content, Education and Training, Inside the Library, Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Personal Archiving, Publications and Resources, Tools and Infrastructure
Posted by: Bill LeFurgy
Amber Case coined the term persistent paleontologyin reference to electronic systems that continuously layer on new information. “The e-mail inbox is a rapidly expanding site of excavation which one must continually query,” she writes. “The newness of everything buries one’s ability to reach it without digging.” I like this association because it lets us look …
Posted in: Digital Content, Tools and Infrastructure