Library Blogs

More on our adventure with recovering Zip disks!

The click of death and more fun with Zip disks!

In November 2108, I was fortunate enough to travel to Fudan University (Shanghai, China) to be a “Foreign Expert” at their library.

Over the past 20 years, the University of Michigan Library has led the way on creating digital collections and establishing best practices around digital preservation that have become benchmark standards for other libraries. However, as our web presence expanded, it became increasingly difficult to adapt it at scale, keep pace with the changing needs of research, and create cohesion between a growing number of applications, sites, and services. It eventually became clear that a new model for web governance was needed. In this post, learn about the library’s history around its web governance and what led us to establish a new committee to create a vision and strategy for our web presence. You’ll also read about some of the committee’s accomplishments so far and learn how the committee’s members are supporting the recently launched Library Search application and the ongoing website redesign.

A brief photo tour of the Digital Preservation Unit's Pop-Up Digital Archiving event for World Digital Preservation Day 2018.

As an intern in Digital Content and Collections (DCC), I have been working with various older digital collections and projects, to address any issues that have come up since their creation. Each of these collections is unique in content and format, with digitization, description, and access processes designed within the context of grants, stakeholder goals, user needs, and technical capacity. Most recently, I completed a project to ensure access to digitized materials from the Superiorland Library Cooperative (SLC) and through this project learned several lessons that are useful for me -- and anyone else working with older digitized materials -- to keep in mind for future projects with digital collections.

Part 3 of the Personal Digital Archiving series looks at storage options for backing up your digital data.

A quick review of Personal Digital Archiving tips.

Our Digital Preservation Lab now has a cool website with shared versions of our workflows to transfer material off current and obsolete media; information on new and vintage equipment used in the lab; and a selection of reports and research on born-digital preservation.

An examination of our new dark preservation repository with some Poe thrown in for fun!