Media Archaeology and Digital Stewardship: An interview with Lori Emerson

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 …

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A Storage Technology Cage Match

The Library of Congress hosts a small annual meeting on preservation storage that brings vendors and the preservation community together to share points of view.  The 2012 Designing Storage Architectures meeting was held on September 20-21, and as usual it was enlightening–and exciting. Two forms of large-scale storage have the largest amount of market share:  …

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Developing a Health and Medicine Blogs Collection at the U.S. National Library of Medicine

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 …

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Born Digital Minimum Processing and Access

The following guest post from Kathleen O’Neill, Archives Specialist in The Library of Congress Manuscript Division continues our series of posts reflecting on CurateCamp Processing. Meg Phillips’s earlier post on More Product, Less Process for Born Digital Collections focused on developing minimum standards for ingest and processing with the goal of making the maximum number …

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Big Data and the Dawn of the Super Researcher

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 …

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Who Do You Want to Be Today?

I lead a group that develops software for the management, preservation and delivery of digital collections.  In some organizations, digital preservation is part of the physical preservation unit.  In some organizations, software development is part of the systems office.  Or software development might be part of a central IT unit. I work with colleagues who …

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Learning to Live With Failures With A Little Help From Redundancy and Diversity

The following is a guest post from Andrea Goethals, digital preservation and repository services manager at the Harvard University library. This post is similar to a presentation I gave as part of a panel called “Assessing and Mitigating Bit-Level Preservation Risks” at DigitalPreservation 2012. It grew out of conversations and work within the NDSA Infrastructure …

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More Product, Less Process for Born-Digital Collections: Reflections on CurateCamp Processing

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 …

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