More and more, archivists find themselves having to be advocates for their own institutions, fellow archival institutions, and themselves. This is an especially complicated turn of events because of discrepancy among archivists as to what specifically constitutes archival advocacy. Over the past year, as a response to this, the Issues & Advocacy Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists has been conducting surveys on archival advocacy in the profession, designed to gauge the advocacy environment as it exists among today’s archivists and archival institutions. The ongoing goal of the project has been to create a dialogue about what advocacy is, how it is defined, and the ways in which advocacy (as well as outreach activities) form part of our professional activities. In doing so, the Roundtable hopes to understand how it can best engage and educate the profession about shaping future archival-related policies.

Good lay-level explanation.

That was the topic discussed recently by OCLC Research Library Partners metadata managers. Carlen Ruschoff (U. Maryland), Philip Schreur (Stanford) and Joan Swanekamp (Yale) had initiated the topic, observing that libraries …

Wiki of digital media (carriers), how to identify them, and possibilities for reading them.

The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council, National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group co-chair and a former Fellow in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. Here on The Signal, members of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation team have been providing some […]

Good basic example of How To Do This Right. Call attention to the number of staff (five, not one) involved.

Apple's iWork update won't let you access documents created as little as five years ago. The solution is obvious

New open source developer consortium promises to end upgrade arms race, enabling users to reclaim orphaned documents

This morning, Stephanie Simon of Politico reports  that indeed, after a long battle, the NY State Education Department has finally agreed t...

Published as Chapter 10 "Research Data Management and the Health Sciences Librarian" in Health Sciences Librarianship edited by M. Sandra Wood. Chicago: Rowman & Littlefield and the Medical Library Association, 2014. Link to book on publisher's website. All rights reserved by the publishers. PDF of book chapter posted with publisher's permission.

June 2013

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Life insurers are testing a new use for data about Americans: predicting longevity. A Deloitte test evaluated applicants based on data about things like  online shopping and magazine subscriptions. 10th in a series.

The final page has a table of "how to design/assess a new service" that is classroom-ready.