When Andrea Goethals wants to escape the demands of her software engineering work at Harvard University library, she heads to the mountains of Maine. But not for pampered leisure. She and her husband volunteer with the Appalachian Mountain Club, maintaining a trail they’ve both adopted. They purge debris, drain water and remove massive obstacles. On […]
The following is a guest post by Gloria Gonzalez, a 2011 Junior Fellow working with NDIIPP. Imagine an internet where every single webpage interconnects to other related information. While browsing a site about the history of the United States, for example, you could see digital versions of the documents that established it–with the click of […]
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, Project Coordinator, Office of Strategic Initiatives. Like many others, I have been fascinated to watch the production of newspapers–as depicted in the movies like The Front Page or All the President’s Men. To be sure, these tales were enlivened by plot elements like exposing Watergate and […]
One of the meetings I look the most forward to every year is the Open Repositories conference, which was recently held in Austin, Texas on June 6-11, 2011. One of the reasons that I enjoy this meeting so much is that is one of the most international meetings that I have the opportunity to participate […]
The diaries of George Washington, the first map that used the name “America,” jazz recordings from the 1920s, pictures from presidential inaugurations—the Library of Congress has a very diverse collection of documents, recordings, pictures and maps that help us understand the story of our nation. Most discussions of saving cultural heritage information involve looking into […]
Economic sustainability is a key issue for digital preservation. In the 2002 report, Preserving Our Digital Heritage: Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the Library of Congress noted that preserving digital content required nontrivial resources. The report also said that forecasting future needs relating to digital preservation was difficult, and “there […]
There is a new collaboration under way, which is community driven, international in scope, and will be an invaluable resource for the entire digital library community. The “Unified Digital Formats Registry” is a project with the ambitious goal of providing online access and open information sharing for the entire range of digital format information. A […]
The following is a guest post by Erin Engle, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP. What do you get when you fill a room full of people interested in social sciences and technology? Oh – and DATA! Lots of data! Discussions about data, examples of data, uses of data. You get the annual IASSIST Conference! The organization has […]
The following is a guest post by Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP. I’m excited to launch a new series, Insights, for The Signal. Insights will feature interviews and conversations between National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation working group members and individuals working on projects related to preservation, access and stewardship of digital information. We are thrilled […]
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. The web turns 20 this year, and while national libraries, archives, universities, and other cultural heritage institutions have been archiving the web since the late 1990s, some key examples of the early web are not in any […]