In November, 2016, staff from the Library of Congress’s National Digital Initiatives division visited the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab as part of NDI’s efforts to explore data librarianship, computational research and digital scholarship at other libraries and cultural institutions. Like many university digital labs, the DSL is based in the library, which DSL […]
Category: digital photographs
Cultural Institutions Embrace Crowdsourcing
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 […]
The Personal Digital Archiving 2015 Conference
The annual Personal Digital Archiving conference is about preserving any digital collection that falls outside the purview of large cultural institutions. Considering the expanding range of interests at each subsequent PDA conference, the meaning of the word “personal” has become thinly stretched to cover topics such as family history, community history, genealogy and digital humanities. New York […]
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 […]
An Online Event & Experimental Born Digital Collecting Project: #FolklifeHalloween2014
If you haven’t heard, as the title of the press release explains, the Library of Congress Seeks Halloween Photos For American Folklife Center Collection. As of writing this morning, there are now 288 photos shared on Flickr with the #folklifehalloween2014 tag. If you browse through the results, you can see a range of ways folks […]
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 […]
A Report On the Personal Digital Archiving 2014 Conference
Cinda May, a key organizer of the Personal Digital Archiving 2014 conference, is one of a growing number of information professionals helping to digitally preserve personal and community history. May, chair of Special Collections at Indiana State University Library, is a co-creator of the Wabash Valley Visions & Voices Digital Memory Project and, as such, she […]
Personal Digital Archiving: The Basics of Scanning
Although the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance focus on digital preservation and access, many of the personal digital archiving questions that the general public ask us are about scanning. Though scanning is a separate issue from digital preservation, scanning does generate digital files that need to be […]
Illinois Library Offers Digital Preservation Aid in Response to Tornado Devastation
It was raining hard on Sunday morning November 17, 2013, as librarian Genna (pronounced “Gina”) Buhr anxiously watched the Weather Channel coverage of the storm system battering central Illinois. Buhr, Public Services Manager at Illinois’ Fondulac District Library, was visiting her parents in Utica, Illinois, about an hour north of Buhr’s home. Her two young […]
Steve Puglia, Digital Preservation Pioneer
Steven Puglia, manager of Digital Conversion Services at the Library of Congress, died peacefully on December 10, 2013 after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. Puglia had a profound effect on his colleagues here in Washington and worldwide, and there is a great outpouring of grief and appreciation in the wake of his passing. The […]