Today’s post comes from Michael Horsley, a Digital Imaging Specialist with the Digitization Services Team. During a long day of scanning glass plate negatives in the Digital Image lab a fleeting image with an intriguing caption caught my eye during a quality control inspection session. As hundreds of images depicting various scenes of the Brooklyn [...]

Most archivists, librarians, and digital preservation folks love metadata — and we at the Archives are no exception.  Metadata is the sort of invisible information stored within or alongside a digital copy of something like a cool, older video about a NASA space flight.  Metadata allows us to keep track of things in a detailed way.  It [...]

In Digitization Services, we’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about quality. What does it mean? How do we measure it? And why should we care about it? After the establishment of the Products and Services (P&S) web portal resource in 2010 (see the http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access/?p=5320 blog post), Digitization Services knew we still had more [...]

The Digitization Services or IDS (formerly known as the Special Media Preservation Division) is NARA’s primary source of in-house digitization and analog reformatting of motion picture film, audio, video, photographs, aerial film, textual documents, cartographic documents, microfilm, and microfiche. 2010 was a year of introspection and change for us. Inspired in part by the Open [...]