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. In this installment of the Insights Interviews series, a project of the Innovation Working Group of the …
In software development a release candidate is a beta version with the potential to be the final product. Welcome to the release candidate for the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. After some fantastic commentary on the blog, and presentations at a series of conferences to solicit feedback, I’m excited to share this revised version of the levels for further …
Most of the conversations I end up in about digital preservation are about the digital versions of analog things. Discussions of documents, still and moving images and audio recordings are important, but as difficult as the problems surrounding these kinds of digital objects are, there is a harder problem: preserving executable content, aka software. Software isn’t …
PBS Off the Book has a nice short video on The Art of Glitch. It’s a fun story about a born-digital art phenomena, but aside from that, I think it’s useful at helping us better understand the nature of digital objects. In the video, artist Scott Fitzgerald gives the following concise argument for the value …
Fixity is a key concept for digital preservation, a cornerstone even. As we’ve explained before, digital objects have a somewhat curious nature. Encoded in bits, you need to check to make sure that a given digital object is actually the same thing you started with. Thankfully, we have the ability to compute checksums, or cryptographic hashes. This …
In what we hope will become a regular feature here on The Signal I am excited to have a chance to chat with Lori Emerson, a representative from the newest member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. Lori is the Director of the Media Archaeology Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English …
The following is a guest post from Christie Moffatt an archivist in the History of Medicine Division and Program Manager of the Digital Manuscripts Program at the National Library of Medicine and Jennifer Marill, Chief of the Technical Services Division for NLM. The National Library of Medicine has a mandate to collect, preserve and make accessible the scholarly …
Video games represent one of the most difficult challenges for digital preservationists. Created for a diverse array of hardware and software platforms, rife with rights issues, and as expressive creative works objects which one hopes to attend to the highest levels of artifactual qualities. Despite being one of the most challenging forms of content, there …
For this installment of Insights, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group’s ongoing series of interviews, I talk with Georgina Goodlander, the Web & Social Media Content Manager for the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Exhibition Coordinator for the Museum’s The Art of Video Games exhibition. There are already some nice interviews exploring the subject …
