Part of my job is being up-to-date on the latest happenings in technology and digital archiving. In my attempts to accomplish this (one can never be truly up-to-date; there’s always some new information out there) I tend to browse through many, many, many, publications, blog postings, presentations, videos, etc. each week. Some are gems, some reinforce knowledge I already had, some introduce new technologies, and some make you wonder why the author bothered. Thankfully that last category isn’t very numerous! Below are articles from the past couple weeks which I’d recommend. I’m listing these partly to spread the knowledge through the RAC, and partly to create a running bibliography of texts from which we can form discussions, or refer to when questions like “What did that project do?” or “Wasn’t there some article on a program that did that well?” come up. Please feel free to leave feedback or responses to the texts in the comments.
The folks over at Princeton discuss the design of their new finding aid website, in Prototyping as a Process for Improved User Experience with Library and Archives Websites. I really like their design and hope that we can implement some of its features in our own finding aid system. I’m hoping to spend some time reviewing how they’re handling digital objects in their system.
Media Archaeology and Digital Stewardship: An interview with Lori Emerson The Library of Congress digital preservation blog, The Signal always provides top-notch content, and this interview is no different. I got a bit sidetracked by the digital poems they mentioned - First Screenings - which are not only AWESOMESAUCE but also highlight the importance of emulation (and also made me relieved that most of our digital records are nice, standard, non-emulating-needing institutional records).
Today is the Day of Digital Archives, 2012!
Lastly, the resources provided by the University of Michigan’s repository, Deep Blue, are not exactly new, but are an excellent resource for digital format information. I’m especially excited about the Best Practice guides they provide for creating PDFs, office documents, images, audio, and video.