A really good resource for those just getting acquainted with digital preservation is MetaArchive‘s recently-released “A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation,” availble in PDF format, or orderable in paper form through their site. Per MetaArchive’s announcement: This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the […]
The New York Times today published an article that reflects some of the challenges of preserving born digital content – that is, documents, data and other content that has been created digitally, on a computer or electronic device, and for which there is no physical original (such as on paper). In particular, they highlight the […]
Of all the work I do, I think dealing with older formats, and just figuring out how they work, is the most interesting aspect. A few weeks ago, a stack of old open real tapes arrived, along with a similar-vintage tape player. The recordings were done in the early 1950s, as part of a project […]
One of the topics I like to bring up in the discussion of preserving digital data is the idea of a Digital Dark Age… the notion of a period in our historic knowledge that ends up getting lost due to a failure to plan and preserve our early digital content. The New Scientist, however, recently […]
The announced obsolescence and discontinuation of a number of film formats by their vendors has resulted in an expected outcry from a niche of users who continue to use these older formats for their creative and artistic works. But another, more surprising result of this community outpour is a sort of grass-roots resurrection of these […]