Friday, April 24, 2009

Digital Preservation Matters - 24 April 2009

Archiving Writers' Work in the Age of E-Mail. Steve Kolowich. The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 10, 2009.

Archiving materials from authors has difficulties in the digital age. Authors have kept their information on hard drives, floppies, other kinds of disks, and a variety of formats. Three things are clear:

  1. the digital age will transform the way libraries preserve and exhibit literary collections
  2. universities must spend money on new equipment and training for their archivists.
  3. scholars will be able to learn more about writers than they ever have before.

Archivists must know how to transfer data to new machines, since old machines will not survive for long. They must continue doing what they have been doing, but now do more. The files may give more information about authors and their influences. This is just the beginning because the authors may also have online accounts, such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, email, and other. It is not always clear who owns what data. “The speed at which universities adopt digital curation may depend on their willingness to divert funds from more traditional areas.”



DVD Copying Case: Why You Should Care. Christopher Bree. Macworld . April 24, 2009.

Details of a court case about copying DVDs and copy-protection. It has implications for fair use, archival copies, and the technology to create the copies.



The UN's World Digital Library. Frances Romero. Time. Apr. 22, 2009

On April 21, UNESCO and the Library of Congress unveiled the world digital library which will allow institutions to share cultural and educational data. It can browse objects by Place, time, topic, type, and institution.

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