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Research Guides

Digital Data comic from xkcd

Digital Data comic from xkcd. Two stick figures talk about how digital data never degrades as the comic slowly degrades in quality until the last panel where it is blurry, with a watermark, has a 9gag logo on the bottom right hand corner, and is a screenshot from a phone, demonstrating the digital data does degrade over time.

Education

​Digital Preservation Handbook - Peer-reviewed handbook that provides a practical guide to managing digital resources and sustaining access to them

Digital Preservation Management - Tutorial on digital preservation that includes definitions, key concepts, practical advice, exercises, and up-to-date references

Digital Preservation Education - Resource providing practical, introductory information about digital preservation and approachable "next step" resources

Tools and Software

The following resources include numerous tools and software for digital preservation:

Digital Curation Resource Guide - Guide organized by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. that includes file formats and guidelines, metadata standards and vocabularies, glossaries, services, vendor software, tools, and more

Introduction to Digital Preservation - Oxford LibGuide on Digital Preservation that includes terms, concepts, models, standards, actions, risks, and tools

Digital Preservation Guide - University of Minnesota guides that include tools for processing, managing, and preserving electronic records

Educational Opportunities

Internships

​Library of Congress Preservation Digital Technology Internship - Internship with the LOC Preservation Reformatting Division. Applications accepted at any time.

Smithsonian Institution Archives - For current or recent undergraduate and graduate students, includes opportunities in Digital Services. Applications accepted 3 times a year

Conferences

NDSA Digital Preservation Conference - Digital Preservation is the major meeting and conference of the NDSA that highlights the theory and practice of digital stewardship and preservation, data curation, the digital object lifecycle, and related issues

Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Meeting - PASIG is dedicated to advancing the practice of digital preservation and archiving

International Conference on Digital Preservation - The iPRES series embraces a variety of topics in digital preservation - from strategy to implementation, and from international and regional initiatives to small organizations.

U.S. Organizations and Coalitions

​Software Preservation network - Organization advancing software preservation through collective projects and partnerships

National Digital Stewardship Alliance - Consortium of organizations committed to the long-term preservation of digital information

HathiTrust - Organization focused on preserving 17+ million digitized items through a collaboration with academic and research libraries. Also provides free access to out-of-copyright digitized content

PORTICO - Community-supported preservation archive for electronic journals, books, and digital collections no longer available from the publisher or other source

International Organizations and Coalitions

Open Preservation Foundation - Collaborative effort to develop resources and open source tools for the preservation of digital content

Digital Preservation Coalition - Seeks to preserve access to digital resources to secure our digital legacy and knowledge base

Digital Curation Centre - Helps institutions preserve digital research data by providing support and practical help

International Internet Preservation Consortium - Consortium of organizations and libraries aimed at preserving knowledge and information from the Internet for the future

UK National Archives - Provides digital preservation resources including guidance for best practices for preserving collections and information about file formats

Web Archiving

Tools

Archive-It - A subscription service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of web content.

 

Internet Archive - A online library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form

 

Webrecorder.io - An open source tool for web archiving created by Rhizome at the New Museum

 

Heretrix - An open source web crawler project designed to respect the robots.txt and other exclusions

 

WARCreate - Google Chrome extension to general Web ARChive (WARC) files from websites

 

Resource Lists

Stanford Libraries Web Archiving Resources - Resources include web archiving tools and various institutional guidance on web archiving as well as recommendations for improving the archivability of your own website

 

University of Pennsylvania Web Archiving LibGuide - Readings on web archiving as well as examples of web archiving projects

 

International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) GitHub - Training resources, list of tools and software for web archiving, and community resources including blogs.

Our Digital Lives

Podcasts

Preserve This Podcast - Project to help podcasters protect their work against the threats of digital decay. There is a zine and a 5-part podcast series available.

 

Email

ePADD - Free and open source software developed by Stanford that supports the appraisal, processing, preservation, discovery, and delivery of historical email archives

 

Library of Congress Email Archiving - Personal email archiving tips

 

Social Media

Social Feed Manager - Open source software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo

 

Social Media Data Stewardship - Project that applies the emerging notion of data stewardship to social media data

 

Documenting the Now - Community developed tool that supports the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content

 

News Archiving

Journalism Digital News Archive - Preserves news content originally produced in digital formats

 

Dodging the Memory Hole - Series that focuses on preserving born-digital news content

 

PastPages - Open-source effort to archive digital news

Blogs

Library of Congress: The Signal - Library of Congress blog covering new developments that have an impact on digital preservation and access

David Rosenthal's blog - Blog run by David Rosenthal who helped start the LOCKSS Program which is aimed at long-term preservation of web published materials

Digital Preservation Matters - Blog run by Chris Erickson, digital preservation manager at BYU, on digital preservation, long term access, digital archiving, digital curation, institutional repositories, and digital or electronic records management

bloggERS - The blog of the Electronic Records Section of the Society of American Archivists includes post on case studies, interviews, news, resources, and more on electronic records issues

UK Web Archive Blog - Blog from the British Library's web archiving team and guests about web archiving and the public UK Web Archive