Keynote given at ELAG2016 (European Library Automation Group) EXIT conference 7 June 2016, The Royal Library, Copenhagen http://elag2016.org/  #elag2016

BloggERS! recently reached out to Trevor Owens and Emily Reynolds from IMLS to discuss the role of archives digital processing activities in the context of the IMLS national digital platform fundin…

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Digitizing and Democratizing New York City's Cultural Heritage

Library professionals and library assistants who lack computer science or audiovisual training are often tasked with writing digital project proposals, grant applications or rationale to fund digitization projects for their institutions. Much has been written about digitization projects over the last two decades; digital storage has been highlighted as a central feature of any digitization project, especially the need to purchase additional storage mechanisms to house digitized collections. What is missing from the library science literature is a method for reliably calculating digital storage needs on the basis of parameters for digitizing analog materials such as documents, photographs, and sound recordings in older formats.

Thirty-eight hundred years ago, on the hot river plains of what is now southern Iraq, a Babylonian student did a bit of schoolwork that changed our understanding of ancient mathematics. The student scooped ...

Adi Kamdar is a 1L at Harvard Law School and our embedded reporter on the Free the Law project. In this first post, he tracks the progress of a casebook ...

In order to fulfill digital preservation goals, many institutions use high-end scanners for in-house scanning of historical print and oversize materials. However, high-end scanners’ prices do not fit in many small institutions’ budget. As digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera technologies advance and camera prices drop quickly, a budget photography studio can help to achieve institutions’ preservation goals.  This paper compares images delivered by a high-end overhead scanner and a consumer level DSLR camera, discusses pros and cons of using each method, demonstrates how to set up a cost efficient shooting studio, and presents a budget estimate for a studio.

I learned this week that Reveal Digital has digitized On Our Backs (OOB), a lesbian porn magazine that ran from 1984-2004. This is a part of the Independent Voices collection that “chronicles the transformative decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s through the lens of an independent alternative press.” For a split second I was really excited … Continue reading "digitization: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should"

A fair, free and open future

Until recently, collections of specimens were basically left in drawers and were not easily searchable on-line but the digitization process is now making them available to researchers worldwide

We hear a lot about “high-res audio” these days. Sound digitized at 192,000 samples per second must be a lot better than the usual 44,000, right? Well, maybe not. We can hear sounds onl…

Abstract This article explores the rich history of social justice as a concern in archival studies and delineates future lines of inquiry for the field. We begin by examining how social justice has been defined in the archives literature and its implications for archival studies. Next, we draw forth five major strands of archival thinking in relation to social justice. We identify prominent areas in the archival literature that highlight the relationship between archives and social justice. We also identify critical questions in the relationship between social justice and archives and propose new research trajectories that we deem necessary to advance the archival field in general and its scholarship in particular. Finally, we argue for the importance of research that strengthens the tenets of social justice as a central principle in archival scholarship and practice.