Many cultural institutions have accelerated the development of their digital collections and data sets by allowing citizen volunteers to help with the millions of crucial tasks that archivists, scientists, librarians, and curators face. One of the ways institutions are addressing these challenges is through crowdsourcing. In this post, I’ll look at a few sample crowdsourcing projects […]
Category: digital formats
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 […]
Office Opens up with OOXML
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. We are pleased to announce the publication of nine new format descriptions on the Library’s Format Sustainability Web site. This is a closely related set, each of which pertains to a member of the Office […]
All in the (Apple ProRes 422 Video Codec) Family
We’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about digital video issues. As mentioned in a previous blog post, the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative published several reports on this topic including “Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video.” Work on the “Eight Federal Case Histories” (PDF) report nudged us to add the Apple ProRes 422 […]
From the Field: More Insight Into Digital Preservation Training Needs
The following is a guest post by Jody DeRidder, Head of Digital Services at the University of Alabama Libraries. This post reports on efforts in the digital preservation community that align with the Library’s Digital Preservation Outreach & Education (DPOE) Program. Jody, among many other accomplishments, has completed one of the DPOE Train-the-Trainer workshops and […]
New FADGI Report: Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video
As part of a larger effort to explore file formats, the Born Digital Video subgroup of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group is pleased to announce the release of a new four-part report, “Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video.” This report has already undergone review by FADGI members and invited colleagues including […]
Comparing Formats for Video Digitization
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. FADGI format comparison projects. The Audio-Visual Working Group within the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative recently posted a comparison of a few selected digital file formats for consideration when reformatting videotapes. We sometimes call these […]
WITNESS: Digital Preservation (in Plain Language) as a Tool for Justice
Some of you information professionals may have experienced incidents where, in the middle of a breezy conversation, you get caught off guard by a question about your work (“What do you do?”) and you struggle to come up with a straightforward, clear answer without losing the listener’s attention or narcotizing them into a stupor with […]
Audio for Eternity: Schüller and Häfner Look Back at 25 Years of Change
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. During the first week of October, Kate Murray and I participated in the annual conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives in Cape Town, South Africa. Kate’s blog describes the conference. This blog […]