How are researchers and scholars going to make use of born-digital primary sources? It’s an open question which many working in digital preservation are interested in. As part of the NDSA innovation working group’s ongoing Insights interview series I am excited to talk with Zach Whalen, an english professor at the University of Mary Washington, …
What does the history of the MP3 format mean for those interested in ensuring long-term access to our digital cultural heritage? In this installment of the NDSA’s Insights interview series I talk with historian Jonathan Sterne about his book MP3: The Meaning of a Format. You can read the introduction to his book, titled “Format …
Continuing the insights interview series, I’m excited to share this conversation with Meg Phillips, External Affairs Liaison at the National Archives and Records Administration. A few years back we “un-chaired” CURATEcamp Processing: Processing Data/Processing Collections together. Meg wrote a guest post reflecting on that event for the Signal titled More Product, Less Process for Born-Digital …
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council and co-chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group. In the latest installment of the Insights Interviews series, a project of the Innovation Working Group of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, we talk with Andrew …
One of the tricks to working in an interdisciplinary field like digital preservation is that all too often we can be using the same terms but not actually talking about the same things. In my opinion, the most fraught term in digital preservation discussions is “archive.” At this point, it has come to mean a …
While many kinds of analog media age with a kind of dignity, taking on a patina of age and the term “vintage,” the same is generally not true of digital media. Of the range of digital media out there, the humble rewritable CD is likely one of the least loved and most rapidly aging and …
How do I know if a digital file/object has been corrupted, changed or altered? Further how can I prove that I know what I have? How can I be confident that the content I am providing is in good condition, complete, or reasonably complete? How do I verify that a file/object has not changed over …
In 2009, a band of rogue digital preservationists called Archive Team did their best to collect and preserve Geocities. The resulting data has became the basis for at least two works of art: Deleted City and One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. I think the story of this data set and these works offer insights into the …
And if so, why would you ever want to? About a year ago the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections announced a rather exciting project, to digitize the data tapes from the Explorer I satellite mission. My first thought: the data on these tapes is likely digital to begin with, so there’s not really something …
