This is a guest post from Alice Prael, Digital Accessioning Archivist for Yale Special Collections at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. As digital storage technology progresses, many archivists are left with boxes of obsolete storage media, such as floppy disks and ZIP disks. These physical storage media plague archives that […]
Category: born digital
Lots of Transfer Collectives Keep Cultural Memory Safe: The Importance of Community Audio/Visual Archiving
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 […]
“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 […]
Closing the Gap in Born-Digital and Made-Digital Curation
This is a guest post by Jessica Tieman. As part of the National Digital Stewardship Residency program, the 2015-2016 Washington, D.C. cohort will present their year-end symposium, entitled “Digital Frenemies: Closing the Gap in Born-Digital and Made-Digital Curation,” on Thursday, May 5th, 2016 at the National Library of Medicine. Since June, our colleague Nicole Contaxis […]
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 […]
The DPC’s 2014 Digital Preservation Awards
In November, our colleagues at the Digital Preservation Coalition presented their Digital Preservation 2014 awards. These awards, which are given every two years, were established in 2004 to help raise awareness about digital preservation. The Library of Congress welcomes any public recognition of excellence in digital preservation. We, too, have given our own awards, most recently […]
We’re All Digital Archivists Now: An Interview with Sibyl Schaefer
Digital was everywhere at this year’s Society of American Archivists annual meeting. What is particularly exciting is that many of these sessions were practical and pragmatic. That is, many sessions focused on exactly how archivists are meeting the challenge of born-digital records. In one such session, Sibyl Schaefer, Head of Digital Programs at the Rockefeller […]
Digital Content and Digital Preservation at The Henry Ford
At the Museum is an interview series highlighting the variety of digital collections in museums and the interesting people working to create and preserve these collections. For this installment I interviewed Ellice Engdahl, Digital Collections & Content Manager, and Brian Wilson, Digital Access and Preservation Archivist, at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. Sue: Tell us […]
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 Vintage Electronic Literature
Dene (pronounced “Deenie”) Grigar’s mother was an artist who painted mainly with oils on canvas. But occasionally she painted on a different medium, such as wood or pottery. Once she experimented with painting on bamboo, a medium she was unfamiliar with. “Bamboo is porous,” said Grigar. “It can absorb the paint. So my mother compensated […]