I had the pleasure of joining a number of colleagues at the inaugural meetup for Digital Cultural Heritage DC last night. The informal group bills itself as a monthly gathering for those “working to acquire, preserve, steward, provide access to, exhibit and interpret digital cultural heritage,” and “a great opportunity for networking with others from …
The following is a guest post by Jennifer Gunter King, Director, Harold F. Johnson Library, Hampshire College. In July, scholars, entrepreneurs and digital preservation practitioners gathered in Arlington, Va., for the annual meeting of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, DigitalPreservation 2012. NDIIPP program management director Martha …
The launch of a new web site is the perfect opportunity for an organization to revamp itself. Information is refreshed and updated, new initiatives are touted while old content and projects get shuffled out of plain sight. Graphics and architectures change to better meet user needs and underlying technologies allow for easier management. Even an …
This is a guest post from George Coulbourne, Executive Program Officer in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, Library of Congress. Braving the heat of an Indiana summer, 21 library, archive, and museum professionals recently completed the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program’s second Train-the-Trainer Workshop. Representing the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, …
In separate “big data” presentations at the Digital Preservation 2012 meeting, Myron Guttmann of the National Science Foundation and Leslie Johnston of the Library of Congress described scenarios that seemed futuristic and fantastic but were in fact present-day realities. Both presenters spoke about researchers using powerful new processing tools to distill information from massive pools …
Digital preservation’s many challenges (planning, choosing formats, metadata, storage, etc.), can be further complicated when dealing with multi-media cultural and arts materials. For example, music and dance performances that incorporate the digital may also include the element of chance, and can change with each performance. Or, maybe a piece of born digital artwork was created with several software programs that are already obsolete. …
We have noted earlier in this blog that digital preservation terminology is hard to pin down with precision. There are seemingly as many interpretations of “authenticity” and “repository” as there are digital preservation practitioners. Digital preservation as a concept actually has even more plasticity when viewed through the lens of popular culture. I did a …
“Do you remember how we did things back when your great great grandma or grandpa [were alive]? We had moved Native Americans from their homelands, so we could have more and more land for ourselves.” The above reference describes the Whitefish Middle School’s Montana Indian Tribes, Modern Life, 2010-2011 Web Archiving Collection. This unique collection, …
The following is a guest post by Emily Reynolds, a 2012 Junior Fellow. One of the many highlights of the DigitalPreservation 2012 conference last month was the Preserving Digital Culture panel, which featured speakers discussing the preservation of born-digital art and other creative output. While much of the conference addressed the often automated management of …
The following is a guest post from Meg Phillips, Electronic Records Lifecycle Coordinator for the National Archives and Records Administration. “What’s the bare minimum I can responsibly do with my electronic stuff?” was one of the central questions on the table at CurateCamp Processing. The unconference, focused on Processing Data / Processing Collections, was a …