Access to Your Archive: Make It Easy, Make a Difference
Why digitize? This is the question many archive owners, collectors, and curators face. In an increasingly digital world, analog access to collections and archives is still the norm. But should it be? A Philosophical Question If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? […]
Chronicling America One Newspaper at a Time
by Shana Scott Above photo from neh.gov Newspapers are unique cultural artifacts that give a broad sense of the world at the time of their printing. The articles may show what was considered important to people, but ads, classifieds, and comics all offer a window into the lives of the public. Newspapers become a snapshot […]
World Digital Preservation Day
by Shana Scott The first Thursday in November is World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD). This year that falls on November 3rd. WDPD is a way to celebrate digital preservation’s contributions to the archival community. If you’d like to join in the celebration, the Digital Preservation Coalition has lots of suggestions and ways to participate and […]
Everyone Who Has Gone Before Me: An Interview
by Andrea Glazer For those in my generation, much of our lives have been lived in a wholly digital world. Maybe that’s what makes the collections we work with so fascinating. Instead of being automatically dumped in digital buckets, every album, letter, and photo is curated to what’s most meaningful to the family it belongs […]
Three Tips for Keeping Zines Pristine
by Andrea Glazer It’s hard to imagine modern life without our digital communities. Before the days of blogs, Instagram accounts, and podcasts about every subject imaginable, it was harder to find communities for specific topics people loved and wanted to talk about. In the time before the internet’s omnipresence, niche groups had to carve out […]
Five Crucial Mistakes Archives Make with OCR
by Marcia Spicer One thing almost every digitization client has in common is a desire to share their collection. That’s great, and it’s a goal digitization works toward almost naturally. But someone has to think about the how. Yes, we want to share, facilitate research, create opportunities for spontaneous discovery of the collection… but how? […]
Practical Tips for Document Longevity
by Marcia Spicer Are you a proud owner of historical material written by or to famous individuals? Perhaps your collection isn’t recognizable to the public but impacts your family or community. Preserving these documents for future generations can be a daunting task for the new or unprepared collector. Too often, collectors inheriting these materials are […]
Backgammon and Bronze Age Toilets: Preserving the Mundane
by Shana Scott Gas station receipts, junk mail catalogs, and notepad doodles aren’t exactly what we imagine future researchers studying to learn about our time in history. And yet, that’s not solely up for modern-day archivists to decide, is it? We’ve written before about the importance of preserving “everyday history,” but what about the stuff […]
Learn: Digital Preservation vs. Digitization
It may feel like the terms “digital preservation” and “digitization” are interchangeable, but it’s better to think of them as fingers and thumbs. All thumbs may be fingers, but not all fingers are thumbs. Digitization is the thumb and digital preservation are the fingers. Digitization is necessary to the overall function of digital preservation, but […]
Video: What Does Access Mean For Your Collection?
For many users, if a collection doesn’t exist where it is searchable online, it may as well not exist at all. What does it take to make a collection accessible, and what would it mean for your organization to have your collection discoverable, online, and accessible? Anderson Archival’s Mark Anderson and Marcia Spicer discuss this […]
