My two young teenage daughters spend hours playing Minecraft, building elaborate virtual landscapes and structures. They are far from alone; the game has millions of fans around the world. Teachers are seizing on Minecraft’s popularity with kids as a tool to teach both abstract and concrete subjects. What’s unique about this situation is not so much […]
Category: digital formats
AV Artifact Atlas: By the People, For the People
In this interview, FADGI talks with Hannah Frost, Digital Library Services Manager at Stanford Libraries and Manager, Stanford Media Preservation Lab and Jenny Brice, Preservation Coordinator at Bay Area Video Coalition about the AV Artifact Atlas. One of my favorite aspects of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative is its community-based ethos. We work collaboratively […]
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 […]
One Format Does Not Fit All: FADGI Audio-Visual Working Group’s Diverse Approaches to Format Guidance
This is the first in a two-part update on the recent activities of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative. This article describes the work of the Audio-Visual Working Group. The second article, to be published on November 4th 2013, describes the work of the Still Image Working Group. I wish I had a quick and […]
Digital Preservation Pioneer: Sam Brylawski
When Sam Brylawski was a teenager he had to write a paper for his high school American history class about Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” so he did something that was ambitious for a high school student: he traveled to the Library of Congress to examine the composition’s original manuscript in the Gershwin collection. Brylawski found […]
♫ 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 […]
Xporting Digital Format Sustainability Descriptions as XML
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. In 2003, we began drafting descriptions of digital formats, intended to support the Library’s preservation planning. Knowing that our descriptions would be of general interest, and wishing to work cooperatively with emerging format registries (e.g., the Unified Digital Format […]
What People Are Asking About Personal Digital Archiving: Part 2
During Preservation Week 2013, I gave a personal digital archiving webinar in which over 600 people participated. Ninety one people submitted questions online and two-thirds of the questions centered on two topics: digital photos and storage. In part 1 of this blog post, I gave sample questions and answers about digital photos. Today I will give sample […]
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 […]