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
Part of the grant that funds our program for publishing interactive scholarly works is dedicated to helping us get to conferences and meetings with authors and colleagues. This year we’ve already been to MLA and AHA, both typical conferences for publishers to attend when their lists involve language, literature, and history, and both of which
2018 is already off to a busy start for supDigital. We covered a couple different conferences last week and are managing the typical catch-up as we return to the office. The American Historical Association held its conference in Washington, D.C. this year, and I attended a pre-conference THATCamp where I engaged with digital historians working
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
In the year 2017, over three decades since the personal computer became virtually commonplace in homes, it’s probably safe to assume many of us have come across the stray CD ROM or USB thumb drive or maybe even floppy disk and eagerly, or perhaps with trepidation, inserted it into a working computer or external drive
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
One of my first projects as digital production associate for the works being published under SUP’s Mellon-funded digital publishing initiative was to create a set of technical guidelines. It has proven to be a complex undertaking and one that is unearthing many philosophical questions and considerations. Over three months of work on these documents, which will be
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
