The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group. Though presented as a unified experience, a website depends on many interrelated parts: document markup and dynamic code, assorted binary file types, software interpreters and platforms. The challenge of web archive preservation planning is to save this experience, …
Technology is the easy part of digital preservation. Actually it’s only easy relative to the other challenges that libraries, archives and other memory institutions face in keeping and serving digital content. The really hard stuff comes down to people: how staff are organized, empowered and trained to do the work. I see two basic issues …
When I meet new people and tell them that I work at the Library of Congress, the first question is usually “What do you do there?” When I explain that part of my job is to oversee a group that develops software, the reaction is often one of surprise: “What? Libraries develop software?” Yes. Yes …
The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. As I’ve written about before, LC takes a selective approach when archiving the web. Selection of sites is not something we automate; Recommending Officers (or, “ROs” in LC lingo), do this work. Recommending materials for addition to …
The following is a guest post by Lara Lookabaugh, an intern working with the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Initiative. UNT receives more than $800,000 dollars in funding to investigate needs in archiving research data http://untsystem.unt.edu/news/2011/August/11-08-09-arch-res-data.htm The first grant of $624,663 from IMLS is for a three-year project to create four graduate-level courses in digital …
The following is a guest post by Abbey Potter, Program Officer, NDIIPP. She is also Communications Officer for the IIPC. It’s been three weeks since the NDIIPP/NDSA partners meeting and to keep the “Make it Work” spirit going we’d like to focus on the work of one of the speakers from that event, Helen Hockx-Yu. …
An abecedarian is one who is learning the fundamentals of something, as in the alphabet, or in this case, digital preservation. Today I am beginning a series that will explore the topic of digital preservation in an alphabetical way. Each post will use a word or phrase as a device to explore a concept and …
The following is a guest post by Erin Engle, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP. On “The Signal,” we’ve talked about different aspects of digital preservation – like here and here – and we’ve talked about geospatial information and digital mapping. In this post, I’d like to talk about the resource NDIIPP is helping to develop (and the …
The following is a guest post by Gloria Gonzalez, a 2011 Junior Fellow working with NDIIPP. When watching a video online, do you ever wonder how much time it took to create? Or what content was left out? During my time as an intern, I worked on a video about descriptive metadata for personal photographs. …
Most people think of books when they think of the Library of Congress, but in fact, the Library is one of the largest collectors of maps in the world. It’s a challenge for any organization, even the Library of Congress, to keep up with the quantity of maps now being created digitally, but there is …