Future Proof wants your ‘digital’ feedback
We receive many enquiries from NSW public offices about digitisation of records. People often search our website for information on this issue and our blog posts on digitisation are consistently popular.
As a result, we have put together some draft guidance on both business process digitisation programs and back-capture digitisation projects.
Preserving Your Personal Digital Photographs – The Library of Congress
Do you wonder if cloud storage is a good option for your personal digital photographs? Do you have questions about metadata and file formats? Are you uneasy about the prospects of keeping your digital photos available for yourself and your family into the future?
…presentation discussed how to identify the different places where personal photographs might lurk, as well as how to decide which images are most important and ways to organize your collection.
Some archival career advice from The Smithsonian
The Smithsonian Institution Archives receives dozens of inquiries every year from students and recent graduates about the archives profession and how to become an archivist. Since this is such a popular topic, we decided to make our responses to the most common questions available to a wider audience.
Pragmatic approaches to the semantic web
Though I have been an advocate of linked data going back to 2006, one of my main theses was that linked data was an inadequate focus to achieve interoperability. The key emphases of my talk were that the pragmatic contributions of semantic technologies reside more in mindsets, information models and architectures than in ‘linked data’ as currently practiced.
“Big data for books”: Harvard puts metadata for 12M library items into the public domain”
Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliographic information about virtually all the 12M works in its 73 libraries. This is (I believe) the largest and most comprehensive such contribution. The metadata, in the standard MARC21 format, is available for bulk download from Harvard. The University also provided the data to the Digital Public Library of America’s prototype platform for programmatic access via an API. The aim is to make rich data about this cultural heritage openly available to the Web ecosystem so that developers can innovate, and so that other sites can draw upon it.
Wikipedia founder to help in government’s research scheme
The government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it.
The initiative, which has the backing of No 10 and should be up and running in two years, will be announced by the universities and science minister, David Willetts, in a speech to the Publishers Association on Wednesday.
John Peel’s record collection: the first look
Peel’s is probably the most celebrated record collection in Britain: 26,000 albums, 40,000 singles and countless CDs, which spread out of Peel’s office and took over a variety of rooms and outbuildings in the home near Stowmarket he invariably referred to as Peel Acres. The singles and CDs, Ravenscroft says, were filed alphabetically, but the albums were a different matter. “They are all filed numerically and cross-referenced with a very old filing cabinet, full of small filing cards that John hand typed himself on his old Olivetti typewriter. The way you access them is that you look in the filing cabinet, find the file card alphabetically, and on the top corner there’s a number.”
For a laugh
Everyone’s doing it these days but are you doing it right?
