In honor of this week's Museum Computer Network conference, I want to talk a bit about the early history of museum computing.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to talk (via email) with Paul Wheatley, of the SPRUCE Project,about an assortment of activities, issues and ideas relating to digital preservation.

Learning by doing and benefiting from a community of practitioners are key aspects of our approach to meeting the challenge of digital preservation.

– PixelVixen707, screen name of “Rachael Webster,” a fictional character in the alternate reality gamePersonal Effects: Dark Art

Quick quiz: Is the employment outlook for librarians growing or shrinking? The answer depends on what you call a “library job.”

From 1970s minicomputers used for military programs (including nuclear weapons) to an IBM punch-card system still keeping the books at a Texas filter supplier, these are the computers that time forgot.

PBS Off the Book has a nice short video on The Art of Glitch. It’s a fun story about a born-digital art phenomena, but aside from that, I think it's useful at helping us better understand the nature of digital objects.

The steering committee of the Society of American Archivists’ Manuscript Repositories Section introduces a new initiative encouraging archivists and their institutions toJump Into managing born-digital content.

The era of Big Data raises many questions about why and how data should or can be preserved, who should lead the effort, and what the cost-benefit equation currently is.

I like lists. I particularly like ordered lists. I’ve even read a book about checklists. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to point out a recent OCLC report, You’ve Got to Walk Before [...]

Stanford University's Julie Sweetkind-Singer discusses the importance and impact of long-term geospatial data storage.

Tech or Treat: Fun Halloween Costumes for Techie EnthusiastsWrittenbyTECHKERonOctober 30, 2012Halloween Tech CostumesWant to go geeky this Halloween? You sure can with these fun, technology-themed costumes that are sure to get some laughs this spooky Halloween. After all, our gadgets should be able ...

In anticipation of the Museum Computer Network conference next week in Seattle, I've been giving some extra thought lately to museum community involvement in digital preservation. We (the [...]

Kent Anderson offers a provocative post in The Mirage of Fixity — Selling an Idea Before Understanding the Concept. Anderson takes Nicholas Carr to task for an article in the Wall Street [...]

On Thursday, 25 October, hundreds of Internet Archive supporters, volunteers, and staff celebrated addition of the 10,000,000,000,000,000th byte to the Archive’s massive collections.

The digital preservation community is small and under resourced. This means we have to work together if we want to make a real impact. We're now seeing the emergence of a host of exciting crowd sourced or collaborative projects.

Prompted by questions from Library of Congress staff on how to more effectively use web archives to answer research questions, I recently gave a presentation on “Using Wayback Machine for Research” (PDF).

Fixity is a key concept for digital preservation, a cornerstone even. As we've explained before, digital objects have a somewhat curious nature.

FEDLINK serves federal libraries and information centers as their purchasing, training and resource-sharing consortium. As the FLICC business subsidiary, customers can tap into the expertise of federal librarians, contracting officers, financial managers, and customer service representatives — ge...

Issues concerning the management and preservation of digital information were examined at the international conference, “The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation,” held in Vancouver (Canada) in September 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary of UNESCO’s Memory of the Wor...

Here at the Library of Congress, there are many projects underway to digitize and make available vast amounts of historic, archival material. One such project is the National Digital [...]

On October 17, I had the extreme pleasure of hearing Cory Doctorow at the Library for talk entitled “A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond.” Not surprisingly, the room was packed with attentive listeners.

Until recently, public libraries had little reason to innovate. Then Google arrived. More disruptive technologies followed, causing an identity crisis for librarians. Now the profession is re-thinking its purpose.

I am excited to be contributing this semester to the End of Term (EOT) harvest project. What, you may rightly ask, is the EOT harvest? So here’s the short answer: The EOT harvest archives web infor...

The consumer cloud performed strongly in the first half of 2012, with the number of personal subscriptions to online storage services at the end of June already at 75% of the market’s projected sum for the year