Physical Media

Many of us now document our lives digitally. As these collections grow, so do the challenges involved in their management, preservation and use. Creators must actively manage their files, and collecting institutions must adapt their processes to accommodate personal digital materials.

This conference focuses on many topics relevant to personal digital archiving. It will provide information useful for libraries, archives and museums, as well as individuals, community groups, activist groups and others interested in personal digital collections.

The world is overflowing with digital data; in fact the digital universe is doubling every two years according to IDC1.
A share of this digital universe has value in the long-term. This is for instance data that is considered part of our cultural heritage, strategic business information or data that must be preserved for legal reasons. In order to ensure long-term survival, these data need to be treated differently than short-lived information.

Shannon Mattern discusses the aesthetics of preservation at the annual Digital Preservation meeting.

Five "lightning" presentations on Day One of the Digital Preservation 2014 meeting included "Beyond the Russian Doll Effect: Reflexivity and the Digital Repository Paradigm" (James Bradley, Ball State University), "Video Game Source Disc Preservation" (David Gibson, Library of Congress), "UELMA-Compliant Preservation: Questions and Answers?" (Rebecca Katz, Council of the District of Columbia), "We Want You Just the Way You Are: The What, Why and When of Fixity in Digital Preservation" (Kate Murray, Library of Congress) and "Save Your Databases Using SIARD!" (Krystyna Ohnesorge, Swiss Federa

Just as we have become accustomed to two worlds of consumption – online and “location-based” retail (what we used to call “shops”) – the concept of museums and galleries as solely physical repositories of history or art is changing.
For today’s museums, galleries, libraries and archives, the biggest challenge is to take up the new opportunities technology offers without being blind to the risks.
A new kind of museum experience

Introduction

Webinar #1 - Overview of digital preservation
Why is it important to preserve digital materials? What items should we be preserving and why? This session will provide a general introduction to the series and offer strategies to help you identify and select items from your collections for digitization and digital preservation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efuqagKZR3o

A summary of Ricky Erway's , Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research, lightning talk session at SAA 2014 in Washington DC on August 16. The premise was that many archives have received materials in forms that they cannot even read. Archives are acquiring born-digital content at increasing rates and it’s hard enough to keep up with current formats. It makes sense to reach out to the community for help with more obscure media. I found ten speakers who had confronted this problem and figured out innovative solutions to getting material into a form that could be more easily managed.

Open source software is playing an important role in digital stewardship. In an effort to better understand the role open source software is playing, the NDSA infrastructure working group is reaching out to folks working on a range of open source projects. Our goal is to develop a better understanding of their work and how they are thinking about the role of open source software in digital preservation in general.

The Best Practices Exchange is a website dedicated to information about the Best Practices Exchange Conferences and an online community for librarians, archivists, records managers and other information professionals dedicated to managing digital information primarily in state government.