PERICLES is a four-year project that aims to address the challenges of ensuring that digital content remains accessible and understandable over time. Within this context we would like to bring to your attention the release of the PERICLES Extraction Tool.
Five Steps to Developing a Research Data Policy
Many institutions are developing research data management (RDM) policies and guidance to assist their people in following developments in good practice and increasing expectations from funders and other bodies.
This guide suggests a number of steps that could be useful when thinking about formalising data management practices via a policy, whether at institutional, faculty or departmental level.
By Martin Donnelly, Digital Curaton Centre
Published: January 2014
The BitCurator Access project will develop open-source software that supports the provision of access to disk images through three exploratory approaches: (1) building tools to support web-based services, (2) enabling the export of file systems and associated metadata, (3) and the use of emulation environments. Also closely associated with these access goals is redaction. BitCurator Access will develop tools to redact files, file system metadata, and targeted bitstreams within disks or directories.
INTRODUCTION
Australia’s public collecting institutions enrich public life by displaying, interpreting, making accessible and preserving the world’s shared cultural, scientific and historic heritage.
Literary fans and academics have always been fascinated by the way author's private papers and correspondence inform and influence their creative output. But with far fewer letters flying between men and women of letters these days, digital files, especially email exchanges, are becoming more and more important.
At the end of last month, the British Library acquired the poet Wendy Cope's archive including its largest cache of an author's email to date: 40,000 emails written since 2004.
David Gallaher was eight years old in 1964, watching satellites twinkling high overhead. That year, the first American to orbit the planet left NASA, the Soviets put the first multi-person crew in orbit, and one tiny satellite, Nimbus 2, was taking grainy black-and-white images of the entire surface of the planet.
Seventeen years before the start of what we know as the “modern satellite record” of sea ice, Nimbus series satellites were snapping images that would turn up on two huge pallets in Gallaher’s office in Colorado 50 years later.
In June of this year, the Library of Congress announced a list of formats it would prefer for digital collections. This list of recommended formats is an ongoing work; the Library will be reviewing the list and making revisions for an updated version in June 2015. Though the team behind this work continues to put a great deal of thought and research into listing the formats, there is still one more important component needed for the project: the Library of Congress needs suggestions from you.
Digital was everywhere at this year’s Society of American Archivists annual meeting. What is particularly exciting is that many of these sessions were practical and pragmatic. That is, many sessions focused on exactly how archivists are meeting the challenge of born-digital records.
The Library of Congress has a fundamental commitment to acquiring, preserving and making accessible in the long term the creative output of the nation and the world. The Library has devised the Recommended Format Specifications to enable it to identify what formats will most easily lend themselves to preservation and long-term access, especially with regard to digital formats.
The Australian CSIRO has released an analysis of Australia’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums (or GLAM industry) has revealed that digital innovation in the sector is inconsistent and isolated. The report provides a roadmap for the industry in order for it to maximise the potential of the digital economy.
With Australia’s rapid uptake of online and mobile platforms, people are now choosing to access and share information in very different ways.