This is a guest post collectively written by the XFR Collective (pronounced “transfer collective”), a grass-roots digitization and digital-preservation organization. They work with artists and media creators to rescue and preserve digital works, utilizing open, free platforms — such as the Internet Archive — for long-term preservation and access. We featured them in two previous […]
Category: archives
Using Three-Dimensional Modeling to Preserve Cultural Heritage
This is a guest post by Elizabeth England, a resident in the National Digital Stewardship Residency program. In recent years, a few news stories focused on the use of digital tools in preserving cultural heritage three-dimensional objects, stories such as the printed reconstruction of the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, Syria and the construction of a […]
The Keepers Registry: Ensuring the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record
This is a guest post by Ted Westervelt, section head in the Library of Congress’s US Arts, Sciences & Humanities Division. Strange as it now seems, it was not that long ago that scholarship was not digital. Writing a dissertation in the 1990s was done on a computer and took full advantage of the latest […]
The TriCollege Libraries Consortium and Digital Content
This is a guest post from Stefanie Ramsay, a Digital Collections Librarian at Swarthmore College, which is part of the TriCollege Libraries consortium. Consortium arrangements among libraries and archives are an increasingly popular strategy for managing the large amount of digital content they produce and for providing increased access to these important materials. Luckily for […]
“Volun-peers” Help Liberate Smithsonian Digital Collections
The Smithsonian Transcription Center creates indexed, searchable text by means of crowdsourcing…or as Meghan Ferriter, project coordinator at the TC describes it, “harnessing the endless curiosity and goodwill of the public.” As of the end of the current fiscal year, 7,060 volunteers at the TC have transcribed 208,659 pages. The scope, planning and execution of the […]
Initiatives at the Library of Congress (Digital Preservation 2016 Talk)
Here’s the text of the presentation I gave during the Initiatives panel at Digital Preservation 2016, held in collaboration with the DLF Forum on November 10, 2016. This presentation is about what the National Digital Initiatives division has been up to in FY16 and what’s coming up in FY17. For a report on the DLF Forum, see this Signal post. […]
Digital Collections and Data Science
Researchers, of varying technical abilities, are increasingly applying data science tools and methods to digital collections. As a result, new ways are emerging for processing and analyzing the digital collections’ raw material — the data. For example, instead of pondering one single digital item at a time – such as a news story, photo or […]
Digital Preservation at the State Library of Massachusetts
This is a guest post by Stefanie Ramsay. How do you capture, preserve and make accessible thousands of born-digital documents produced by state agencies, published to varying websites without any notification or consistency and which are often relocated or removed over time? This is the complex task that the State Library of Massachusetts faces in […]
A National Digital Stewardship Resident at the U.S. Senate
This is a guest post by John Caldwell. On Friday, January 29, 2016, I hosted my fellow National Digital Stewardship residents, their mentors, and the NDSR program staff to our cohort’s first enrichment session at the US Senate. The morning started with two presentations. First, Mark Evans, Director of Digital Archives and Information Resources Management […]
The Veterans History Project Marks 15 Years of Service
“The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation.” — George Washington The Veterans History Project honors the lives and service of all American veterans –not […]