Library of Congress racing to preserve vast CD collection. A portion of the CD collection belonging to the Music and Geography and Maps divisions at the Library of Congress is seen July 17, 2014. Amanda Reynolds, Library of Congress CDs may not be the first thing to come to mind when you think of the Library of Congress, but it houses more than 500,000. The extensive collection includes everything from music to maps and labs where researchers are destroying CDs to learn how to preserve them, CBS News' Jim Axelrod reports. In 1982, Billy Joel's album "52nd Street" was the first commercial compact disc to be released. Since then, hundreds of billions of CDs have been sold worldwide. Once the latest music technology, the CD is now a collectors' item, replaced by digital downloads. Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress, is hoping to figure that out.
She and her colleagues are studying CDs so they can better understand how to keep them safe for posterity. "And that's the challenge, I think," France said . " Saving Digital Mementos from Virtual Worlds. The United States Capitol Replica on planetminecraft.com by rodgermourtagh2 My two young teenage daughters spend hours playing Minecraft, building elaborate virtual landscapes and structures.
They are far from alone; the game has millions of fans around the world. Teachers are seizing on Minecraft’s popularity with kids as a tool to teach both abstract and concrete subjects. What’s unique about this situation is not so much the product as that a virtual world is functioning as both a fun, engaging activity and a viable teaching tool. We’re witnessing the birth of a new genre of tools and a new set of challenges for preserving the digital creations people build with those tools. Like most parents, I save many of the things that my daughters create.
From where I’m sitting in my home as I write this blog post, I can see their works dotting the room. I never gave much thought to their virtual gaming activities, aside from monitoring how much time they spend on their electronic devices. Microcomputer Software Lives Again, This Time in Your Browser. The miracle is now so commonplace that it’s invisible: we have the ability to watch video, listen to music, and read documents right in our browsers.
You might get a hankering to hear some old time radio, or classic television programs, or maybe read up some classic children’s books, you’re just a couple clicks away from having them right there, in front of you. Not so with classic software. To learn and experience older programs, you have to track down the hardware and media to run it, or download and install emulators and acquire/install cartridge or floppy images as you boot up the separate emulator program, outside of the browser. Unlike films or video or audio, it was a slower, more involved process to experience software. Until now. JSMESS is a Javascript port of the MESS emulator, a mature and breathtakingly flexible computer and console emulator that has been in development for over a decade and a half by hundreds of volunteers.
The Web as a Preservation Medium. This is the text of a talk I gave at the (wonderful) National Digital Forum in Wellington, New Zealand on November 27th, 2013. You can also find my slides here, and the video here. If you do happen to watch the video, you’ll probably notice I spent more time thinking about the text than I did practicing my talk. Hi there. Thanks for inviting me to NDF 2013, it is a real treat and honor to be here. I’d like to dedicate this talk to Aaron Swartz. Aaron cared deeply about the Web. In a heartbreaking way I think he may have cared more than he was able to. Next year it will be 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal to build the World Wide Web. Medium and preservation are some pretty fuzzy, heavy words, and I’m not going to try to pin them down too much. I like Gitelman’s definition because it emphasizes how important the social dimension is to our understanding of media.
Unlike the traditional media we care for, the Web confounds us all equally. Everything is Broken The First URL. Cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/emg/library/pdf/rinehart/Rinehart-EMG2004.pdf. Acid-Free Bits. v1.0 June 14, 2004 By Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin Contents Preface by Joseph Tabbi: Acid-Free Bits and the ELO PAD Project Sidebars: Flash, Inform, The Connection Muse Colophon Preface: Acid-Free Bits and the ELO PAD Project With the release of Acid-Free Bits (version 1.0), the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) brings to the public concerns that have been debated here for at least two years.
The best that current digital repositories have accomplished is a home, not for literature, but for scholarly journals. In response, the ELO committee for the Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination of electronic literature (PAD) commissioned Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin to draft an appeal directly to authors, in the hope that the creative component does not separate out from the curatorial. For the ELO Board and PAD Core Group, —Joseph Tabbi 1 Keeping E-Lit Alive Electronic literature doesn't come on bound, offset-printed pages. Why preserve electronic literature? 2 Acid-Free Bits. Born-Again Bits. v1.1 August 5, 2005 By Alan Liu, David Durand, Nick Montfort, Merrilee Proffitt, Liam R.
E. Quin, Jean-Hugues Réty, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin Alan Liu (UC Santa Barbara) David Durand (Ingenta and Brown University) Nick Montfort (University of Pennsylvania) Merrilee Proffitt (Research Libraries Group) Liam R. E. Quin (W3C) Jean-Hugues Réty (Université de Paris 8) Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Brown University) Contents Preface: Born-Again Bits and the ELO PAD Project Sidebars (Glossary Definitions): Base-64, Emulator, HyperCard, Interpreter/Reader, Metadata, Open source, Platform, Porting, Source code, Storyspace, XML, XML schemas (Quotations): Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey, Preface: Born-Again Bits and the ELO PAD Project Acid-Free Bits by Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (June 2004) was the first publication on digital preservation to emerge from the Electronic Literature Organization's Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) initiative. 1.1 What Is the object of migration?
Archiving the World Wide Web. Next section in this report >> | previous section >> | report contents >> Peter Lyman School of Information Management and Systems University of California, Berkeley Problem Statement: Why Archive the Web? The Web is the largest document ever written, with more than 4 billion public pages and an additional 550 billion connect-ed documents on call in the "deep" Web (Lyman and Varian 2000). The Web is written in 220 languages (although 78 percent of it is in English) by authors from every nation. Ninety-five percent of Web pages are publicly accessible, a collection 50 times larger than the texts collected in the Library of Congress (LC), making the Web the information source of first resort for millions of readers. Nonetheless, the Web is still less than 10 years old, and the economic, social, and intellectual innovation it is causing is just beginning.
The Web is growing quickly, adding more than 7 million pages daily. The cultural problem. The technical problem. The economic problem. Preserving.exe Report: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software. Shelved Software at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center Our world increasingly runs on software. From operating streetlights and financial markets, to producing music and film, to conducting research and scholarship in the sciences and the humanities, software shapes and structures our lives.
Software is simultaneously a baseline infrastructure and a mode of creative expression. It is both the key to accessing and making sense of digital objects and an increasingly important historical artifact in its own right. When historians write the social, political, economic and cultural history of the 21st century they will need to consult the software of the times. I am thrilled to announce the release of a new National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program report, Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software, including perspectives from individuals working to ensure long term access to software. Software Preservation Summit. Back to the future: Preserving the history of video games. Video games aren't made to last.
The vast majority of floppy discs aren't readable by today's computers. Hardly a year goes by before another online game disconnects its servers, closing its doors to faithful players. Small teams of independent developers release their titles on digital marketplaces without any physical copies to accompany them. In a digital age where data erodes faster than it can be stored, the collected creativity of thousands of developers could someday be lost for good — unless we find a way to preserve it. To most people, history means looking to the past. But to the researchers and archivists at the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, history means opening their eyes to watch it unfold all around them.
They're analyzing. The men and women of the ICHEG are hard at work. And it's a lot harder than they thought it would be. Source material Jon-Paul Dyson is a historian. His speech is meticulous. He was in Italy during the 1990 World Cup. Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress. (The following is a guest post from the Library’s Director of Communications, Gayle Osterberg.) An element of our mission at the Library of Congress is to collect the story of America and to acquire collections that will have research value. So when the Library had the opportunity to acquire an archive from the popular social media service Twitter, we decided this was a collection that should be here. In April 2010, the Library and Twitter signed an agreement providing the Library the public tweets from the company’s inception through the date of the agreement, an archive of tweets from 2006 through April 2010. Additionally, the Library and Twitter agreed that Twitter would provide all public tweets on an ongoing basis under the same terms.
This month, all those objectives will be completed. We now have an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress but an important one to its mission. Hashing Out Digital Trust. The following is a guest post by Kate Zwaard, a Supervisory Information Technology Specialist in the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. Corned beef hash, by Joyosity, on Flickr The Library of Congress and its partners continue to work on ways to help users communicate and evaluate trustworthiness of the electronic material they are accessing. The risk is higher for some content more than others. It wouldn’t be worth the time and effort it would take to alter this webpage, for example, because the pay-off would be low.
But you could imagine some monetary incentives for illegally altering a federal regulation or law. That’s why government agencies, libraries and archives are so invested in thinking of ways to secure the chain of custody for electronic material. What is a Hash? A hash function transforms a string of characters into another (usually shorter) string of characters (a hash value). What is a Cryptographic Hash? SSL, by jeff_golden, on Flickr. File Fixity and Digital Preservation Storage: More Results from the NDSA Storage Survey. The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. A vexing property of digital objects is the difficulties they pose to ensuring their ongoing authenticity and stability.
Files can become corrupted by use, bits can rot even when unused, and during transfer the parts essential to an object’s operability can be lost. At the most basic level, digital preservation requires us to be confident that the objects we are working with are the same as they were prior to our interaction with them. To deal with this problem, those in the digital preservation field often talk about the fixity of digital objects. Fixity, in this sense, is the property of being constant, steady, and stable. Thankfully, there are some great ways that content stewards can check their digital objects to make sure that they maintain these qualities.
NDSA Members’ Approaches to Fixity Checking The Future of Fixity Note on survey data. Server company for famous literary website <em>3:AM</em> vanishes --- with 12 years' worth of archives. “My Name Is Ozymandias…”