I’ve talked about Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work in a range of posts on digital objects here on The Signal. It seemed like it would be valuable to delve deeper into some of those discussions here in an interview. If you are unfamiliar, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University …
On a crisp, clear January day in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Lucinda Marker and her husband, John Tull, stepped inside an Airstream trailer that StoryCorps converted into a mobile recording studio. Marker and Tull were there to interview each other for an audio memento, to reminisce and talk about significant moments in their shared lives, especially …
A few months back several members of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Levels of Digital Preservation team presented a short paper at Archiving 2013, The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation: An Explanation and Uses. While the Levels of Digital Preservation will continue to be refined and improved we are thrilled to report that they are …
In The Is of the Digital Object and the is of the Artifact I explored the extent to which digital objects confound and complicate some of our conceptions of what exactly digital things are. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the nature of digital objects offers an important opportunity for the cultural heritage community to consider …
A few months back, during the Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference, I was struck by how much interesting research was being done in the field of digital preservation. Everything from digital forensics to gamification, all of it thoughtful, much of it very practical and applicable. Still, I couldn’t help wishing that there was even more …
The following is a guest post by Michelle Gallinger, Digital Programs Coordinator with NDIIPP and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance facilitator. DLib Magazine, the Magazine of Digtial Library Research, has recently published “NDSA Storage Report: Reflections on National Digital Stewardship Alliance Member Approaches to Preservation Storage Technologies.” The structure and design of digital storage systems …
The collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum include recorded accounts from people who experienced one of the most horrific events in history. And, by the very nature of these interviews, the Museum faces a unique challenge: the last of the potential interviewees are aging and dying. Time is running out and opportunities to record …
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 …
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 …
