Alex Howard comments on questions about ethics and ethos in an age of exponential technological change.

When it comes to preserving movies, the digital revolution may turn out to be a catastrophe.

Preservation of born-digital video is one of the more challenging types when it comes to digital files. As we noted in August, the Archives worked with Smithsonian Channel programs on DVD this summer. This project helped us develop workflows we are now adopting with some born-digital video. Video on authored DVD is complicated. If you have ever viewed the files on a computer, usually you will see an AUDIO_TS folder and a VIDEO_TS folder. The VIDEO_TS folder contains VOB, IFO, and BUP files and the AUDIO_TS folder is empty.

The Smithsonian Channel produces award-winning television programming that engages viewers much in the same way as the Smithsonian's museums and galleries do throughout the United States with their visitors. Just as the Smithsonian is working to digitize its collections for greater access and preservation, the Smithsonian Channel and the Smithsonian Institution Archives are also undertaking various efforts to ensure the digital preservation of these television programs. The reformatting workflow for this project has been dynamic, and it should be.

The two FADGI Working Groups are exploring file formats for still images and video.  The explorations are using similar, matrix-based tools to make comparisons relevant to preservation planning.

Why weren't they taking disk images?!

The Ohio State University Libraries created an organizational policy for digital preservation, shared here to address the policy development process a

After companies shut down and collectors lose interest, the Library of Congress is supposed to keep our cultural history intact. But digital media has turned our understanding of preservation on...

Background It is scientifically and ethically imperative that the results of statistical analysis of biomedical research data be computationally reproducible in the sense that the reported results can be easily recapitulated from the study data. Some statistical analyses are computationally a function of many data files, program files, and other details that are updated or corrected over time. In many applications, it is infeasible to manually maintain an accurate and complete record of all these details about a particular analysis. Results Therefore, we developed the rctrack package that automatically collects and archives read only copies of program files, data files, and other details needed to computationally reproduce an analysis. Conclusions The rctrack package uses the trace function to temporarily embed detail collection procedures into functions that read files, write files, or generate random numbers so that no special modifications of the primary R program are necessary. At the conclusion of the analysis, rctrack uses these details to automatically generate a read only archive of data files, program files, result files, and other details needed to recapitulate the analysis results. Information about this archive may be included as an appendix of a report generated by Sweave or knitR. Here, we describe the usage, implementation, and other features of the rctrack package. The rctrack package is freely available from http://www.stjuderesearch.org/site/depts/biostats/rctrack under the GPL license.

Information about Designing Storage Architectures 2013.

Librarians caution that we are tumbling toward a digital memory hole in which large portions of our literary heritage could one day be lost altogether.