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: digital preservation
Developing a Digital Preservation Infrastructure at Georgetown University Library
This is a guest post by Joe Carrano, a resident in the National Digital Stewardship Residency program. The Joseph Mark Lauinger Memorial Library is at home among the many Brutalist-style buildings in and around Washington, D.C. This granite-chip aggregate structure, the main library at Georgetown University, houses a moderate-sized staff that provides critical information needs […]
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 […]
The TriCollege Libraries Consortium and Digital Content
This is a guest post from Stefanie Ramsay, a Digital Collections Librarian at Swarthmore College, which is part of the TriCollege Libraries consortium. Consortium arrangements among libraries and archives are an increasingly popular strategy for managing the large amount of digital content they produce and for providing increased access to these important materials. Luckily for […]
“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 […]
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 […]
Digital Collections and Data Science
Researchers, of varying technical abilities, are increasingly applying data science tools and methods to digital collections. As a result, new ways are emerging for processing and analyzing the digital collections’ raw material — the data. For example, instead of pondering one single digital item at a time – such as a news story, photo or […]
The Astrophysics Source Code Library
This is a guest post by Nicole Contaxis. On April 12th2016, Alice Allen, editor of the Astrophysics Source Code Library, came to the National Library of Medicine to speak with National Digital Stewardship Residency participants, mentors and visitors about the importance of software as a research object and about why the ASCL is a necessary and […]