On a recent trip I visited a funky vintage store to see if anything caught my eye. While I was easily able to keep myself from buying any jewelry or taxidermy, I came across a number of displays of family photographs available for sale. Not only were there bowls of loose photos, there was a …
The popularity of genealogy websites and TV shows is rapidly growing, mainly because the Internet has made it so convenient to access family history information. Almost everything can be done through the computer now. Before the digital age, genealogical research was not only laborious and time consuming, it also resulted in boxes of documents: photos, …
Scientific data management has some buzz going. As a longtime data archivist/advocate this is a dream come true for me. I’ve pinched myself a couple of times to make sure it’s really happening. For decades, scientific practice focused attention on the published results of research. A substantial infrastructure supports this literature, including an article citation …
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead. The second in my series of “ask the Recommending Officer” posts features a conversation with Cassy Ammen, who shares her experience in helping to build the September 11 Web Archive. Who are you, and what’s your job at the Library of Congress? …
When was the last time you wrote a letter, on paper? Other than my note-to-self stickies (my desk usually has a bunch), or greeting cards, I personally have not written much of substance, just on paper, in a long time. These days, of course, we are engulfed in the digital versions of note writing – …
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. I am attending the annual conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) in Frankfurt, Germany, hosted by the Hessischer Rundfunk (the public broadcasting unit for the German state of Hesse), the German public broadcasting archive, …
The following is a guest post by Kate Zwaard, a Supervisory Information Technology Specialist in the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. I used to have a note on the wall of my office that said “get the records off the floor.” It reminded me that making sure the collections are safe comes first. …
The following is a guest post by Victoria Priester, a 2011 Junior Fellow working with NDIIPP. After completing the North Carolina Public Outreach and Education Project, my next Junior Fellow internship activity involved analyzing trends in web technology on sites featured in the Library of Congress Web Archives. I focused on congressional campaign web sites …
What a treat – I was able to listen to an historic 1912 recording of the violinist Fritz Kreisler playing his Schön Rosmarin – and I ventured no farther than my computer. Amidst the crackle and hiss of the old recording, Kreisler’s rich sound came through, and gave me the experience I was looking for …