“It’s Dead, Jim”: Resurrecting an Obsolete File, Part 2

In part 1 of this story, I described the difficulty of accessing a commercial CD-ROM published in 1989. Eventually, out of frustration, I questioned its value and wondered who actually cared about outdated software. So I consulted some colleagues. It turns out that some gamers care, especially those who are fanatical about the original look …

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Omeka’s Recipes for an Open Source Community

The Omeka project team is coming up with some good solutions for building an open source community.  Omeka, an open source web publishing platform for cultural heritage collections, was developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.  (An overview of Omeka is given in a previous blog post …

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Providing Access to 70 Million Copyright Records

This is a guest post from Mike Burke from the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. The U.S. Copyright Office has a comprehensive set of records about books, periodicals, music, motion pictures and other works that were registered with the Office between 1870 and 1977.  The records include transfers and assignments of rights …

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NDIIPP and the Online Video Revolution

It barely needs to be said that video is a great way to get ideas across in a succinct and entertaining manner. But with the increased acceleration of broadband internet adoption, videos are increasingly becoming a primary information source (and search engines are recognizing this). The digital preservation community is only beginning to get into …

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Crowdsourcing the Civil War: Insights Interview with Nicole Saylor

The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. I’m excited to offer this fourth interview for Insights, an occasional feature sharing interviews and conversations between National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group members and individuals involved with projects related to preservation, access and stewardship of digital …

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The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 2

The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. A previous post suggested how the digital environment within computer programs and systems creates an artifactual element to born-digital records. An analog equivalent to this idea can be found in the popular Thomas Jefferson’s Library exhibit …

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“It’s Dead, Jim”: Resurrecting an Obsolete File, Part 1

While clearing out some personal clutter recently, I came across an old CD-ROM, published in 1989, that I always assumed was of great cultural value. Of course, when I tried to play it I got nothing but error messages and I set about finding a way to make it work. The CD-ROM is the Electronic …

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Diversity of Access to Digital Preservation Collections; first results from the NDSA Storage Survey

The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of Strategic Initiatives. What are the access requirements for digital cultural heritage collections? This was one of the questions that the National Digital Stewardship Alliance started exploring earlier this year. Different access requirements result in very different kinds of preservation storage …

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