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: bit preservation
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Can I Get a Sample of That? Digital File Format Samples and Test Sets
If you’ve ever been to a warehouse store on a weekend afternoon, you’ve experienced the power of the sample. In the retail world, samples are an important tool to influence potential new customers who don’t want to invest in an unknown entity. I certainly didn’t start the day with lobster dip on my shopping list […]
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 […]
♫ Beep, Boop, La La La: The George Sanger Collection at UT Austin Videogame Archive
In 2007, George Sanger and three other videogame industry leaders collaborated with the University of Texas at Austin to create the UT Videogame Archive at the Briscoe Center for American History. Sanger — who is best known by his persona, The Fat Man– is an award-winning, groundbreaking composer and sound designer who has created audio for more than 250 […]
What People Are Asking About Personal Digital Archiving
During Preservation Week 2013, I gave a webinar about personal digital archiving. Over 600 people participated and, during the post-presentation question section, 91 people submitted questions online. I had time to answer about a dozen or so. After the webinar, the hosts from the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services sent me the complete […]
What are We Going to do About Hardware?
On May 20-21, 2013, the Library of Congress hosted one in its series of small invitational digital content at-risk summits, this one on the topic of software preservation. “Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software” covered a wide range of topics around software preservation, every type of software and interactive media art and engaged multiple […]