Digital Preservation Workshop and Tutorial

I didn’t blog very much this month; the start of the school year is always a hectic time and we had what must have been a record number of technical problems with our e-resources. Besides that, I’ve been preparing for Cornell’s Digital Preservation Workshop, which requires completion of a pre-workshop tutorial and the reading of a couple hefty articles beforehand. The tutorial is very worthwhile on its own, and even if you’re not into the whole digital preservation thing you might be interested in the Chamber of Horrors, which illustrates media obsolescence, and the Timeline of Digital Technology and Preservation, which reveals, among other things, the original name of IBM and the identity of the first computer bug (it was a moth).

I hope to blog about the workshop, but will probably do so after the whole thing is over since I’ll have a long commute to and from Ithaca all week.

2 replies on “Digital Preservation Workshop and Tutorial”

  1. Did the tutorial give you the basic concepts that you needed so that you were able to “hit the ground running” in the workshop? Did it ensure that everyone was at the same starting point? I would think that one of the benefits is that everyone came to the workshop understanding the same terminology and concepts.

  2. Yes, absolutely. It includes concepts and terminology. It provides a good overview of what they call “foundation documents”: Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities from RLG and OCLC and the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System, now an ISO standard. I managed to read through the first document but not the second before the workshop, so the tutorial was especially helpful for understanding OAIS.

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