I keep lots of digital photographs. Hundreds—thousands?— of family members, colleagues and others reside in my collection and are, as Susan Sontag said, “illuminated by a flash, fixed forever.” As forever as I can manage, that is. Digital photos, like all computer files, are disturbingly prone to corruption and loss. As someone long involved with …
The following is a guest post by Steve Puglia, Manager of Conversion Support Services at the Library of Congress. When you work at the Library of Congress on digital preservation projects, you know you’ll have the opportunity to contribute to (and sometimes learn about) new and exciting endeavors in the realm of technology and content …
Over the past few years I have been organizing my family’s digital videos and digitizing our old videocassettes. All along I have tried to follow the personal digital archiving advice that my colleagues and I publish about organizing and backing up your personal collections. Now that I have collected, organized and stored our videos on …
The following is a guest post by Abbey Potter, Program Officer, NDIIPP. She is also Communications Officer for the IIPC. The Internet is a vast utility shared across borders and cultures–a resource like no other. It presents information from governments, news outlets, corporations, nonprofits and cultural heritage institutions with the thoughts, feelings and everyday outputs …
Libraries, archives, and museums are acquiring increasing numbers of born-digital collections. I’ve been interested to see the increased use of digital forensics tools in the appraisal and processing and accessing of such collections. But there are challenges. Some of the software tools come from the realm of legal forensics, where chain of custody and recovery …
The following is a guest post by Gloria Gonzalez, a 2011 Junior Fellow working with NDIIPP. The conclusion of May marked a significant event here at the Library of Congress—the arrival of the 2011 Junior Fellow interns. This year there are forty-one Junior Fellows; we spent the past week learning the history of the Library …
Every once in awhile here at “The Signal”, we will feature the work of staff members to highlight what’s going on “behind the scenes” in NDIIPP. This week, it’s not a person it’s a team – the NDIIPP Communications Team, to be exact. Six staff members – Mike Ashenfelder, Erin Engle, Butch Lazorchak, Abbey Potter …
Saving digital information is a lot like jazz — it is creative, diverse, and collaborative. There are a variety of styles and musical approaches to jazz. Jazz musicians contribute their unique and unscripted experience and response to the composition. Digital preservation organizations partnering with the Library are a diverse, creative and collaborative community developing tools …
The American Society of Media Photographers is a trade organization whose members create works primarily for publication. ASMP offers members legal, business and technical information and it advocates for photographers’ legal rights. In 2007, NDIIPP awarded funding to ASMP, which ASMP used to develop a comprehensive digital photography resource online. ASMP titled it Digital Photography …
It’s many adults’ worst nightmare: how to entertain and (try to) educate thirty 8th graders for an hour? Especially when the subject matter is as potentially complex as how to preserve digital information. Well, the first thing to do is to try and think like the teenagers who visited the Library on May 13, 2011 …