Category Archives: Preservation
The Digital Public Library of America Launched
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to … Continue reading
Posted in Digitization, Libraries, Preservation
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The Surui Cultural Map: Digital Preservation
The Surui Cultural Map shows the Surui tribe of the Amazon’s vision of their forest, including their territory and traditional history. To create this map, Surui youth interviewed their elders to document and map their ancestral sites, such as the … Continue reading
Posted in Digitization, Maps, Mobile, Preservation, Social Impact
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Preserving and Digitizing Timbuktu’s Medieval Manuscripts
Sarah Laskow in The Boston Globe: Though today Timbuktu is a remote and dusty city of 54,000 at the edge of the Sahara, 500 years ago it was a major commercial crossroads and a great center for scholarship. Copied onto … Continue reading
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Preserving Astronomy’s Photographic Legacy
From FierceBigData.com: “In a 2009 paper called ‘Preserving Astronomy’s Photographic Legacy: Current State and Future of North American Astronomical Plates,’ Wayne Osborn, department of physics at Central Michigan University, and Lee Robbins, department of astronomy at the University of Toronto, … Continue reading
Posted in Astronomy, Big Data, Digitization, Preservation
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Why Does Timbuktu Matter?
“Timbuktu sits on the edge of Saharan desert. It was a trading entrepôt in the age when the camel was the only means of transport and it became a centre of commerce in the region; trade in books come to … Continue reading
Posted in Knowledge compilations, Libraries, Preservation
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Earliest Intact European Book Now Digitized
The British Library has announced that it has successfully acquired the St Cuthbert Gospel, a miraculously well-preserved 7th century manuscript that is the oldest European book to survive fully intact and therefore one of the world’s most important books. The £9 … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Digitization, Libraries, Preservation
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Lost and Found: GeoCities
Good alerts us to The Deleted City, “a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century.”
Digital Preservation: Lost and Found Research
The fast pace of technology’s advance has left some data behind as data stored on tapes, floppy disks, and other media that is now unreadable by modern computers is essentially lost. In addition, file formats change as new programs are … Continue reading
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Yeats Lost and Found at Boston College
When he was just 18 or 19 years old, in 1884, Yeats wrote a play titled “Love and Death.’’ The work was hidden among boxes of his journals, notebooks, and correspondence purchased by Boston College in 1993 from Michael Yeats, … Continue reading
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Earliest Surviving Dated Printed Book
Today in 868, The Diamond Sutra was published in China. The copy in the British Library is “the world’s earliest complete survival of a dated printed book.”
The Story of Information 