YouTube is definitely the wild-west for video content, and if you look hard enough, you’ll find a lot of vintage video content. Quite a few of it is uploaded by people whose rights to publish the stuff is questionable, but while it’s there and before it gets taken down, it’s pretty fascinating to come across old […]
The facility I work in at Rutgers, known as the Scholarly Communication Center (SCC), has a fairly short history in the grand scheme of academia, and yet a fairly long one when it comes to the rapid changes in technology it has seen in its lifetime. It was originally started in the 1996, and meant to […]
As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous articles, I’m incredibly skeptical of the long-term success of any digital storage attempt that relies on a single medium as its container. In particular, I find CDs and DVDs to be extremely suspect in terms of their longevity. Those of us who have been around the block […]
As the person responsible for handling the various file formats in RUcore, the digital library repository for Rutgers University Libraries, I’ve been looking with trepidation at the increasing sizes of the digital assets people are starting to create. In 2004 when the architecture for this was first envisioned, very few digital items grew past the hundred-megabyte […]
Controversial as it may be to archivists of both the digital and analog realms, Google is often seen as the ubiquitous oracle of record by the general online population. Websites (including libraries) strive to be listed on its search engines; it runs the de facto video archive for the internet at large; it’s made searching patents and even scholarly […]