Library Blogs

The Library of Congress is accepting feedback on its Recommended Format Specifications for its annual update. The deadline to submit feedback is tomorrow, March 31st.

Here at the U-M Library, we’re committed to identifying opportunities for engagement between Library staff and students. But identifying these opportunities can be difficult for our Library’s IT unit since we’re not involved with students as part of our day-to-day work. How do we as tech professionals engage with the student community?

It’s possible we should have written this blog post years ago, when we first created our workflow for how we shepherd digitization projects through our Digital Library. Well, we were busy creating it, that’s our excuse. Three years later, we’re on our third iteration.

This inaugural post of Bits and Pieces answers the age old questions: What is digital preservation? Why are you writing about it? Who the heck are you?

Meet Laura. She spent her summer doing research in the Special Collections Library, and I was able to talk with her for a few minutes on her last day about her experience.

(by Kat Hagedorn, Christina Powell, Lance Stuchell and John Weise) The one constant in digital preservation over the past couple of decades has been change. Digitization standards have changed as equipment has improved and become more affordable, formats have come and gone, and tools have been developed to help with automated format creation and validation. The progress made on this front has been great, but how do we reconcile older content with current digitization and preservation standards?

American Libraries Magazine recently published an article featuring the Video Game Collection at the Library of Congress. According to the article, the collection preserves every game turned in for copyright registration, which works out to be about 10% of the games published each year. They collect the games themselves, along with promotional materials and guides associated with each game.