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On Feb. 15, the Archive Team, a loose collective of programmers and netizens, received its equivalent of a 911 call: The founder of Posterous, a blogging platform,announced the site was shutting down -- and taking its users' content down with it. After years spent convincing people to trust Posterous as the repository for their baby photos, recipes, musings and travelogues, the company gave its over 15 million users just ten weeks to back up their information before it would be permanently deleted. A handful of Archive Team volunteers quickly convened in a chatroom to figure out -- like they had many times before in similar situations -- how to save Posterous' millions of posts from disappearing with the site itself.
In terms of digital literary archives, one of the lessons for today's archivists is that so-called e-manuscripts are highly unstable, and need early curatorial intervention to secure them against the threats of technological obsolescence.
This means that the writers involved become increasingly aware of interest in their papers, and for novelist Jonathan Franzen, this changes everything: 'Unfortunately, I think that once writers become self-conscious about preserving archival material, the game is over...I also don't see how you resist the temptation to select material that suggests the most flattering narratives. And not just select, but actively create!'
[...new forms of digital archives will have wide-ranging implications for the ways that society experiences and remembers itself [...]
With computers growing smaller and lifestyles going mobile, less and less devices offer sufficient space for internal optical drives. Option 1: USB Stick Option 2: SD(HC) Card Option 3: External Hard Drive (HDD) Option 4: External Solid State Drive (SSD) Option 5: Cloud Storage "Many alternatives for optical drives exist, but few can compete with the price and theoretical lifetime of Blu-ray discs. On the other hand, many make for better long term investments. In the long run, you should always have your data stored in at least two future-proof locations. But for the moment, Blu-ray discs and DVDs are a viable storage method. Just make sure you move your data before your last way to access them disappears.
Do you still use optical discs to store or transfer data?"
Via liblivadia
By Audra:
This week, I attended the second annual Screening the Future conference, held at the University of Southern California. Screening the Future 2012: Play, Pause and Press Forward was organized around...
Talk with David S.Ferriero, Archivist of the United States | Archives and Public History Digital - http://t.co/pvreAu3A... "While the Archivist did not deliver a formal speech, the wide ranging Q&A touched upon many of the current conversations and concerns within the archival community. One important topic discussed was the role of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and of its leadership to the larger archival community. As we all know, NARA safeguards and preserves the most important records of the U.S. government yet it was interesting to learn that only equates to roughly 3% of all records created. The protocols of NARA have often been reflected in the practices of private or independent archives and in the advent of electronic formats, many repositories are watching how NARA handles ingesting these records. The Archivist was enthusiastic about how NARA could help the larger archival community and we hope that future Archivists of the United States will share this vision. Mr. Ferriero views the archiving of electronic records as an exciting development and challenge for our profession. As such, he discussed the proprietary software Lockheed is developing for NARA to ingest digital formats and it was encouraging to hear of the Archivist’s enthusiasm for open-source software that could be used elsewhere in the archival community."
Join WITNESS and the New Tactics community for an online dialogue on Archiving Human Rights for Advocacy, Justice and Memory from May 16 to 22, 2012. Archiving and preservation have long taken a backseat to more urgent aspects of human rights documentation and advocacy, but that is beginning to change. Human rights archives are increasingly playing a pivotal role in advocacy, restorative justice, historical memory, and struggles against impunity. At the same time, however, archivists and activists alike are grappling with the mounting challenges posed by the proliferation of digital documentation. How can we ensure that the critical documentation created today will be preserved and accessible in the future? In this dialogue, we will explore the tactics and methods used by archivists to preserve human rights information."
RT @tadawes: For Archivists, ‘Occupy’ Movement Presents New Challenges - Wired Campus - http://t.co/iKpx3Hmg... By Jeffrey R. Young:
"Howard Besser, a New York University archivist, recently got into a shouting match at an Occupy protest, making a case for why the activists should preserve records of their activities.“Within the Occupy movement there’s a huge suspicion of traditional organizations, including libraries and universities,” Mr. Besser explained Monday at the spring meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information. The shouting match was an extreme moment, but Mr. Besser and other archivists on a panel here explained that they have had to take unusual steps to try to gather a snapshot for future scholars of the nationwide Occupy protests, which call attention to income inequality in the United States. Those steps—including distributing postcards promoting archiving at protests, developing automated systems to download photos posted online, and asking participants to vote on which images are most important for the historic record—could serve as a model for preserving future events."
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RT @Jenny_Mitcham: New blog post: Some thoughts on pdf/a 3: As a digital archivist, I need to keep my ear to the ground with reg... http://t.co/tD34ZtbpWz
"The damage from Sandy’s flooding took Chelsea galleries by surprise. The swelling water knocked artworks from walls and poured into basement storage areas, where art spaces and artists alike often store the work that’s not on display. Zach Feuer Gallery’s sloped space meant that water washed directly toward fragile work. Printed Matter encountered a similar issue, with soaked stock going to waste on the sidewalk. But it wasn’t only physical property that was damaged in the hurricane." [...] The salt content and the toxicity of the water that came into the building corrupted everything it touched. Years and years of exhibition records, files, and media-driven artist projects were put at risk. Though we think of digital creations as somehow non-physical entities, most of these works were made in the pre-cloud era, and stored as extremely physical things vulnerable to physical problems. The digital isn’t so digital any more when the metal computer tower files reside in is getting eaten away by chemicals. Eyebeam had to go into crisis mode. Teams of conservators gathered and volunteered to clean, as best they could, the media storage formats that formed Eyebeam’s artistic and curatorial heritage. New media documentarian and Eyebeam resident Jonathan Minard participated in the efforts, and published a short video showing the problems the institution now faces. - Video here: http://vimeo.com/53849333
Posted by Elaine Ellis: "Mél Hogan is a digital archivist doing a two-year research fellowship in digital curation for her post doc at CU Boulder." Interview: "1. What are the big concerns among digital archivists? Generally I think digital archivists who focus on the web are concerned with the quantity of information continuously created and shared across the globe, tracking this proliferation, its speed, and the various networks through which data travels. The big concerns are around the interplay of these things; for traditional librarians and archivists this has meant a shift to a hybrid role, as custodians and as mediators. Offline: media format management, migration, and interoperability continue to pose serious problems to preservation, as is it traditionally understood in those institutions." The rest of the interview here: http://blog.gnip.com/mel-hogan-digital-archiving/
Melissa Mannon: "The biggest mistake I see new consultants make is jumping into a situation with theory at the forefront of their brains. It is not practical for every repository to reach the pinnacle of archival perfection. Theory should be kept in the back of the brain while one evaluates a site and determines how much theory can be realistically applied to a certain situation." 1. Aiming for the Ideal 2. Overestimating what is fiscally feasible 3. Overestimating Staffing 4. Forgetting or Not Realizing Political Considerations 6. Discounting Community"
ASHA SRIDHAR: "As an ageing record spins untouched by the spokes of a gramophone at the Roja Muthiah Research Library, M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar's timeless song Un Azhagai Kaana from the movie Thiruneelakantar is converted into 2-d black and white images by a device called IRENE, preserving it for posterity. Other than the Library of Congress in the United States, Roja Muthiah Research Library is the only institution that has IRENE (Image Reconstruct Erase Noise Etc), an ingenious device that helps in archiving audio content of old records without scratching or even touching the record, says G. Sundar, director of the library. IRENE, which reached the library two weeks ago, has just been set up, and will help the library archive audio content from records which are too fragile to be played with a conventional player or are deteriorating. “A high-end camera captures images of the grooves as the record is rotating. The software acts as a virtual needle by detecting the edges of the grooves. These images are then converted into sound files,” he says."
Smithsonian (blog): Film vs. Digital: Archivists Speak Out [...] "Skip Elsheimer, a media archeologist with A/V Geeks, believes that access to materials is key. “Access is the first step toward preservation,” he said. “When films are online, people can access them and identify areas for research. You can say, ‘You know what? That title’s important because it was made by a special company, or it’s the first time a musician scored something, or it’s an early appearance by an actor.’” Digital answers some of these access issues, but also raises other questions. “Videotape is going away,” Elsheimer pointed out. “The crushing blow was the tsunamis in Japan last year that hit the Sony tape manufacturing plants. A lot of people changed over to file-based formats at that point.” But what format do you use? “When YouTube came out, it was a pretty big deal,” Elsheimer said. “We’re still talking to archives who want a YouTube channel, so that’s what the bar is. And that bar’s not very high. But a lot of people just want to see something, even if they’re seeing it in the worst possible quality.” Elsheimer believes how we watch movies determines the delivery format. “With High Definition, video has gotten bigger, but people are watching it smaller—on iPhones and iPads,” he said. “What’s changing now is the software for reading video files. Final Cut was a big thing for a while, but we’re shifting to another format. Are QuickTime files going to be valuable anymore? Probably not.”
Digital archiving meets student life: how Stanford Libraries handles it. V pertinent to my @simmonsgslis practicum. "In the face of challenges posed by an increase in social media, archivists at the Stanford University Libraries have adapted new technologies to digitally archive a traditionally community-driven database of Stanford documents. Library Archivist Daniel Hartwig said that documents have been traditionally collected from Stanford staff or alumni who feel that they have something to contribute to the study of the history of Stanford. The catalog includes personal letters of former University President Donald Tresidder, lecture notes from students in the 1960s and materials from the controversial work of psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. (OLLIE KHAKWANI/The Stanford Daily) “We’re lucky in that our focus is limited to Stanford so we have a kind of built-in mechanism there for alumni to donate things,” Hartwig said. However, now that correspondence and official documents are often in digital form, collecting materials for the archives has become more difficult."
Ars speaks to the Library of Congress and gets the backstory behind the decision to archive every tweet for posterity.
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