The annual Personal Digital Archiving conference is about preserving any digital collection that falls outside the purview of large cultural institutions. Considering the expanding range of interests at each subsequent PDA conference, the meaning of the word “personal” has become thinly stretched to cover topics such as family history, community history, genealogy and digital humanities. New York […]
Category: archives
Digital Archiving Programming at Four Liberal Arts Colleges
The following guest post is a collaboration from Joanna DiPasquale (Vassar College), Amy Bocko (Wheaton College), Rachel Appel (Bryn Mawr College) and Sarah Walden (Amherst College) based on their panel presentation at the recent Personal Digital Archiving 2015 conference. I will write a detailed post about the conference — which the Library of Congress helped […]
Archiving the Personal Digital Documents of Congress
By early December 2014, a Congressional election year, newly elected Members of Congress were preparing for public service as outgoing Members were ending their public service and attending exit briefings. At an event sponsored by the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress, the December 3rd “Life After Congress” seminar, Robin Reeder, Archivist of the […]
Tracking Digital Collections at the Library of Congress, from Donor to Repository
When Kathleen O’Neill talks about digital collections, she slips effortlessly into the info-tech language that software engineers, librarians, archivists and other information technology professionals use to communicate with each other. O’Neill, a senior archives specialist in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, speaks with authority about topics such as file signatures, hex editors and checksums even […]
Five Questions for Will Elsbury, Project Leader for the Election 2014 Web Archive
The following is a guest post from Michael Neubert, a Supervisory Digital Projects Specialist at the Library of Congress. Since the U.S. national elections of 2000, the Library of Congress has been harvesting the web sites of candidates for elections for Congress, state governorships and the presidency. These collections require considerable manual effort to identify […]
The Library of Congress Wants Your File Format Ideas
In June of this year, the Library of Congress announced a list of formats it would prefer for digital collections. This list of recommended formats is an ongoing work; the Library will be reviewing the list and making revisions for an updated version in June 2015. Though the team behind this work continues to put […]
Untangling the Knot of CAD Preservation
At the 2014 Society of American Archivists meeting, the CAD/BIM Taskforce held a session titled “Frameworks for the Discussion of Architectural Digital Data” to consider the daunting matter of archiving computer-aided design and Building Information Modelling files. This was the latest evidence that — despite some progress in standards and file exchange — archivists and the […]
Preserving Digital and Software-Based Artworks: Recap of a NDSA Discussion
In response to a suggestion from our active membership, the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group recently hosted a discussion about preserving digital and software-based artworks. Interestingly, the suggestion for this topic came not from a museum staffer but by Winston Atkins, Preservation Officer at Duke University Libraries. Complex materials like digital art works and […]
A Report On the Personal Digital Archiving 2014 Conference
Cinda May, a key organizer of the Personal Digital Archiving 2014 conference, is one of a growing number of information professionals helping to digitally preserve personal and community history. May, chair of Special Collections at Indiana State University Library, is a co-creator of the Wabash Valley Visions & Voices Digital Memory Project and, as such, she […]
What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers
One of the tricks to working in an interdisciplinary field like digital preservation is that all too often we can be using the same terms but not actually talking about the same things. In my opinion, the most fraught term in digital preservation discussions is “archive.” At this point, it has come to mean a […]