In getting ready to make a transition from digital preservation and repository development at the Library of Congress to digital preservation at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), I was asked if I would write a post about what I’ve been doing and what I will be doing at NARA. Don’t mind if […]
Author: Leslie Johnston
What Could Curation Possibly Mean?
My colleague Trevor Owens wrote a great blog post entitled “What Do you Mean by Archive?” This led to a follow-up discussion where I publicly announced on Facebook that I wanted to write about the term “curation.” Its seemingly widespread use in popular culture in the past 4-5 years has fascinated me. Every time I […]
Preserving News Apps
On Sunday, March 2, I had the opportunity to attend an OpenNews Hack Day event at the Newseum in Washington DC, sponsored by Knight-mozilla OpenNews, PopUp Archive, and the Newseum. The event was held in conjunction with the NICAR (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) conference on working with datasets and developing interactive applications in journalism. […]
6 Emerging Initiatives for Digital Collections
I was asked to present a talk today for an internal group at the Library of Congress based on my recent experiences participating in the Top Tech Trends panel at the 2014 American Library Association Midwinter meeting. It was suggested that I present a “Leslie-fied” version of the always-inspiring landscape talks that my colleague Cliff […]
Considering Emulation for Digital Preservation
There was a week in January 2014 where I participated in three meetings/events where emulation came up as a digital preservation solution. Emulation has really hit its stride, 20 years after I first heard about it. An emulator is an environment that imitates the behavior of a computer or other electronic system. In recent years, […]
Packaging eSerials for Transfer and Preservation
In my work at the Library, one of my larger projects has to do with the acquisition and preservation of eserials. By this I don’t mean access to licensed and hosted eserials, but the acquisition and preservation of eserial article files that come to the Library. In many ways, this is just like other acquisition […]
Am I a Good Steward of My Own Digital Life?
After reading a great post by the Smithsonian Institution Archives on Archiving Family Traditions, I started thinking about my own activities as a steward of my and my family’s digital life. I give myself a “C” at best. Now, I am not a bad steward of my own digital life. I make sure there are […]
Before You Were Born: The Hardware Edition
I increasingly deal with vintage hardware. Why? Because we have vintage media in our collections that we need to read to make preservation and access copies of the files stored on them. I spend a lot of time thinking about hardware that I have interacted with and managed over the years. Some of it was […]
Planning for Preservation Storage
Every year the Library of Congress hosts a meeting on Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections, aka the Preservation Storage Meeting. The 2013 meeting was held September 23-24, and featured an impressive array of presentations and discussions. The theme this year was standards. The term applies not just to media or to hardware, but to […]
Digital Preservation at the National Book Festival 2013
This past weekend I got to do one of my favorite things of the year: work at the NDIIPP Digital Preservation booth at the 2013 National Book Festival. Why is it one of my favorite things to do each year? Because I get to hear from real people about what their personal digital preservation issues […]