Preserving Digital Legislative Information: Wrapping Up the MTSA Project

At the beginning of this month we published States of Sustainability: A Review of State Projects funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) (PDF), a report written by Christopher A. Lee of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The report provides a succinct overview of our recent work with state …

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Digital Preservation Pioneer: Anne Van Camp

Listen to the podcast interview. Anne Van Camp, director of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, radiates exuberance about her work. You would think she won the lottery. Van Camp is a historian by training and an archivist by circumstance. She began her career at Chase Manhattan Bank as an archives manager, went on to Stanford’s Hoover …

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Floppy Disks are Dead, Long Live Floppy Disks

They lie in wait, silent sentinels from the era when personal computing first burst into our lives. Their secrets are inscrutable to the human eye.  Often they have lived for years–decades even–under rough conditions that challenge their fundamentally delicate constitutions. Floppy disks are both a bane and a blessing to digital preservationists. The blessing part …

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Pass it On: Library of Congress Events for Preservation Week 2012

The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. “mr Ballard left home bound for Oxford. I had been Sick with the Collic. mrs Savage went home. mrs foster Came at Evening. it snowd a little.” So begins the diary of Martha Ballard on January 1, …

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The April 2012 Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available

The April 2012 Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/newsletter/201204.pdf In this issue: *Nominations being accepted for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Awards *How Many Libraries of Congress Does it Take? A look at an unusual unit of measurement *What’s the Value of A Broken Link? *Becoming Digital, Or, What Comes …

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Preservation of and Access to Federally Funded Scientific Data

This is a guest post by George Alter, Director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Research data produced by federally funded scientific projects should be freely available to the wider research community and the public at large. That simple statement should not be controversial, especially as federal research funding agencies increasingly require …

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Open Source Software and Digital Preservation: An Interview with Bram van der Werf of the Open Planets Foundation

The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, a Digital Archivist in the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. In this installment of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group Insights series, I am excited to have the chance to chat with Bram van der Werf, Executive Director of the Open Planets …

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