Nieman Lab: Building a digital hospice. “Earlier this year, I talked with some people about setting up a new publication. We had a specific focus, a budget, and a great list of potential collaborators. What we didn’t have is a shared vision for what would be the end of the publication. How would we know that it is time to throw in the towel? And then what? It wasn’t so much that my cohort and I disagreed about what to do at the end, but that we had no answers for these questions. It was reason enough to table the discussion.”
born digital
Make Tech Easier: How to Find Out When a Webpage Was Published
Make Tech Easier: How to Find Out When a Webpage Was Published. “When you’re doing research on a topic, it’s vital to ensure your sources are up to date. If you’re writing an academic paper, dates of publication are often required in the citations. The majority of the time, getting the date is easy: simply look on the site and find the “published on” date to find out how recent it was. Things get a little more complicated when there is no date listed on the webpage. When this happens, how do you know when the page was published?”
The Next Web: Reddit’s data hoarders are frantically trying to save Tumblr’s NSFW content
The Next Web: Reddit’s data hoarders are frantically trying to save Tumblr’s NSFW content. “By Wednesday afternoon, just two days after the announcement, a group was already hard at work attempting to archive the whole damn thing, or, most of it anyway. Redditor u/itdnhr began the process, collecting some 67,000 NSFW Tumblr accounts and compiling a massive list. He then shared it with r/Datasets, where other redditors stripped the non-working accounts, leaving 43,000 accounts. Preserving Tumblr‘s NSFW accounts, though, isn’t without its challenges, both in scope and legality.”
Disappearing movies and games: How safe is your digital collection? (The Age)
The Age: Disappearing movies and games: How safe is your digital collection?. “It’s not just video content, either. We’ve also gone digital in a big way for music (only 25 per cent of revenue in 2017 was from physical formats like vinyl and CD) and interactive electronic games (just one dollar in every five comes from actual disc sales). Only books are bucking the trend, with e-books accounting for less than a fifth of the market. You don’t have to be a devotee of Marie Kondo – author of the 2014 bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up – to see why. Digital libraries are just so much neater, tidier, more space-efficient. But are they as safe?”
Phys .org: Protecting our digital heritage in the age of cyber threats
Phys .org: Protecting our digital heritage in the age of cyber threats. “One of the key functions of the government is to collect and archive national records. This includes everything from property records and registers of births, deaths and taxes, to Parliamentary proceedings, and even the ABC’s digital library of Australian news and entertainment. A new report released today from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) considers the important role these records play as the collective digital identity of our nation. The report’s author, Anne Lyons, explains how an attack on these records could disrupt the day-to-day functioning of society, and why we need to do more to protect them.”
Stanford Libraries: Experimenting with ePADD: finding strategies for screening and processing email
Stanford Libraries: Experimenting with ePADD: finding strategies for screening and processing email. “I’m excited to make my debut post in my new role as the Digital Archivist for Special Collections! Since I’m the newest member of team ePADD I thought it would be only fitting to write my inaugural post on the subject of email. I recently worked with the email contained in the Robert Creeley papers and it gave me the opportunity to experiment with the ePADD software and find some effective strategies for processing email. Working on this project also gave me a chance to think a little more deeply about how we process email and how we document the decisions that we make during processing. As the practice of collecting, processing, and providing access to email archives expands, archivists will need to develop approaches for processing large email collections efficiently and establish new policies for documenting that work.”
TechCo: 5 Tools to Help You Search the Archived Internet
TechCo: 5 Tools to Help You Search the Archived Internet . “Anything that’s low tech is dismissed as ‘from the stone age,’ but stone is by far the most stable way to record information. Not only will the hard drives and networked routers of today never last a thousand years, but plenty of information online won’t even last the decade. As local newspapers or long-in-the-tooth startups go under, they all leave dead links scattered across the internet, constantly replaced with fresh links that will themselves eventually die. Wow, sorry, didn’t mean to get too dark there. My point is, memories that you might want to keep are increasingly likely to exist only on the internet — rambling G-Chat conversations with your best friend, say, or your first WordPress blog. If you want to preserve, protect, or search through your online footprint, read on to learn which five online tools can best help you comb through the archived internet.”
