Android Police: The Play Store rolls out auto app archiving option for everyone. “Auto archiving was previously only available when you were already running low on storage, with a prompt appearing asking you if you’d like to turn the option on to save some space. As spotted by Mishaal Rahman on X (formerly Twitter) and AssembleDebug on Telegram, the auto archive option is rolling out to a lot more people.”
Michigan State University: File not found: Biodiversity needs better data archiving. “Missing metadata — data that provides information about other data — might not sound like a big deal, but it’s a costly problem that’s hindering humanity’s plans to protect the planet’s biodiversity. ‘The way I see it, it’s pretty simple,’ said Rachel Toczydlowski, a postdoctoral researcher in Michigan State University’s College of Natural Science. ‘If we want to monitor and conserve global genetic diversity — the most fundamental level of biodiversity — we need to improve our data archiving practices ASAP.’”
NARA: National Archives and Library of Congress Join PDF Association. “Today, the National Archives and the Library of Congress announced joining the PDF Association , which promotes adoption of international standards for portable document format technology, as partner organizations. Both federal agencies collect, and produce, numerous documents as PDFs.”
JSTOR: Browser Tab Clutter Is the New Hoarding . ” Instead of a physical pile of diaries and scrapbooks, I have Facebook and Instagram. Instead of stocking up on craft supplies, I can order what I need when I need it—confident of next-day delivery. Actually, scratch that: with 3D printers getting cheaper and cheaper, I’m supposed to print what I need. It hasn’t worked out that way, however.”
WIRED: Old-Guard Archivists Keep Federal Data Safer Than You Think. “Since election night, hundreds of people have come to events across the country to log data they feared would get disappeared by government agencies in the Trump administration—because of connections to climate change, or gun violence, or any number of other subjects. Coordinated by groups like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, every 404 error on a government website has made these would-be archivists suspicious. But not every 404 error is evidence that some critical dataset got tossed. The webpages might be the same; it’s the world around them that changed.” I think the activist archivists are doing something important and I’m a bit upset that this article seems to belittle it. But there’s important background information here.
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