After launching on May 31, “The Signal” had a strong first month. We published 27 posts and are pleased to have had over 60 comments during June. The blog appears to reach a broad audience, which is exactly what we hoped for. Staff wrote about digital preservation outreach events, significant reports and publications, data forensics …
Nowadays when we prepare a will, we have the added responsibility of leaving instructions to our loved ones about what to do with our online things after we die. Bequeathing has grown more complicated. Much of our online content consists of our writings – email, text, tweets, blogs, wikis and more – and our loved …
The following is a guest post by Erin Engle, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP. Imagine starting something from scratch. A home project, a work project, or maybe you’re even baking a cake, from scratch. Now imagine what the dedicated staff of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture are doing – they are building …
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 …
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 …
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 …