I’ve spent this week in Fort Worth, Texas at the Joint Conference of Digital Libraries. It’s a conference that brings together a somewhat surprisingly diverse set of people, from academics, to computer scientists, to web archivists, to, (of course) librarians. But despite its title, a show of hands at the first keynote indicated that only
The IIPC has accepted a panel proposed by Jasmine Mulliken, Anna Perricci, and Sumitra Duncan for inclusion in its 2018 Web Archiving Conference program. While the program has yet to be released, we are excited to be part of what promises to be a dynamic and productive conversation. The conference will take place in Wellington,
In the book publishing world, a pretty clear line exists between the editorial and production workflows. That line is transmittal. For our digital projects, this line more blurry. You could even imagine it as a very wide line, with a transparency setting of 35% or so (for all the graphic designers out there), that sits
Last week I attended LDCX at Stanford University. Though the conference prides itself on the multiple interpretations of the abbreviation, it has in the past stood for “Library Developer Conference fill-in-your-own-X.” The L has grown to include the whole community of libraries, museums, galleries, and archives—essentially anyone tasked with the stewardship of cultural artifacts and
Progress continues on accessioning and depositing our first publication’s archive into our Stanford Library’s digital repository. While the project still lives in its original format online after its initial release almost two years ago, it’s never too soon to start safeguarding against the inevitability of digital decay. In fact, there’s a lot to be said
About this time last year, I began working on the Technical Guidelines for authors whose work we had accepted for publication. Completed in June, these guidelines were then posted on our website so current authors, as well as any prospective authors who might be interested, could view them. As expected, we’ve been learning a lot
A few weeks ago I posted an interview with Webrecorder’s Dragan Espenchied in which he detailed the features and uses of the web-archiving tool developed by Rhizome. A fellow Mellon-funded project, Webrecorder has been especially intriguing to us because it is perhaps the most specifically focused solution to providing readers of our web-based interactive scholarly
As is apparent by now, we spend a lot of time thinking about ways to preserve and archive the digital web-based projects we’re publishing. While our technical guidelines provide authors with recommendations for building projects that are more easily sustainable, the fact is technology changes, and even the most rigid technical standards and requirements will
Part 2 of the Technical Guidelines Series focuses on documentation. It’s a topic that is touched on in the previous Archivability section, but it’s one that really requires a bit more unpacking, so it has its own page in our recommendations package. As usual, I won’t reprint the document in this blog post—you can view
It’s been widely noted that the typical website lasts roughly three to five years. One of the goals of SUP’s Mellon grant is to mitigate that inevitability by exploring a range of preservation approaches for the web-based works we’re publishing. While documentation is a necessary component of archiving digital content, an ideal archive would also
