It has been just over a year since we kicked off a deep dive into the Library of Congress Web Archives on the Signal! Now at over 2 petabytes, the web archives are a complex aggregation of interrelated web objects that make up the internet as we know it (images, text, code, audio, video, etc.). […]
Category: digital formats
Memory XFR
This is a guest post by Siobhan C. Hagan reporting on the Memory XFR event hosted by the American Folklife Center and the DC Public Library. Siobhan is the Memory Lab Network Project Manager at DC Public Library, where she leads the IMLS National Leadership Grant project to embed digital preservation tools and education in […]
Centralized Digital Accessioning at Yale University
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 […]
FADGI’s 10th Anniversary: Adapting to Meet the Community’s Needs
This is a guest post by Kate Murray, IT Specialist in the Library of Congress’s Digital Collections and Management Services. Started in 2007 as a collaborative effort by federal agencies, FADGI has many accomplishments under its belt, including the widely implemented Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials (newly updated in 2016); open source software, […]
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 […]
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 […]
New FADGI Guidelines for Embedded Metadata in DPX Files
The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group is pleased to announce that its new draft publication, Embedding Metadata in Scanned Motion Picture Film Files: Guideline for Federal Agency Use of DPX Files, is available for public comment. The Digital Picture Exchange format typically stores image-only data from scanned motion picture film or born-digital […]
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 […]
Improving Technical Options for Audiovisual Collections Through the PREFORMA Project
The digital preservation community is a connected and collaborative one. I first heard about the Europe-based PREFORMA project last summer at a Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative meeting when we were discussing the Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting comparison matrix. My interest was piqued because I heard about their incorporation of FFV1 and Matroska, […]