Digital Preservation -dot- gov’s What You Can Do page : highlights your biggest digital at-risk items: email, computer files, storage disks, digital files, and the needle-in-a digital haystack problem of finding what you want in a pile of digital material.
Preserving a digital object is not the same as preserving, say, a book or photograph. You can put a book on a shelf or a photo in a box and (if kept dry and safe) look at it 50 years later. The same is not true with a digital object. This is why, in many cases, digital materials are considered more fragile than physical ones.
OMG! You can take a DID YOU KNOW? quiz, too.*
*I took it. Missed one because I was thinking more of my own “don’t break the web” habits than, say, how quickly news stories disappear from news websites.
Kewl! UCSB Librarian Named “Pioneer of Digital Preservation” … by the Library of Congress. The pioneer? Larry Carver. At first glance (all I’ve taken), it looks like a cross between Google Earth and an über reference librarian.
“Geospatial technology in the context of libraries is to create software to search for information by pointing to a place on the Earth’s surface and — say using the Internet — ask what data, books, art, etc. is available for that spot or location. It searches by using longitude/latitude coordinates to look for information about that spot. So, the technology is a complex software that can search over millions of maps, aerial photographs, satellite imagery, or any other information that has location information in its metadata [catalog record].”
Okay, it has nothing to do with oral history. Unless you’ve got a project that calls on lat-long data. (latitude longitude) But it’s cool ...Read More