Digitality

What does it mean to have your data in digital form?

Not your father’s iPod… well, actually it is (a Walkman)

For Sony Walkman’s 30th anniversary, 13-year old Scott Campbell tries it for a week. Hilarious for us oldsters to see our old fave equipment through a young-person’s eyes.

My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day.
He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

Size? cumbersome. Handy belt-clip, but with that weight? (you hafta read the article to find out its effect for current 13 year olds).

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity,... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Audio • Audio: Hardware • Digitality • Longevity • Memorabilia
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London: Digital Lives Research Conference

Feb 9-11 in London: 1st Digital Lives Research Conference is from the project of interest to “individuals who wish to manage their own personal digital collections for family history, biographical or other purposes.”

There’s a blog associated with the Project/Conference. Have no idea if there’ll be postings from the conference, as the blog’s author, Jeremy John said, “My new year resolution is to blog more frequently.” (ahem, Jeremy. I can relate!)

Conference topics include:

• Digital Lifelines: Practicalities, Professionalities and Potentialities
  • Aspects of Digital Curation
  • Digital Economy and Philosophy
  • On the Monetary Value of Personal Digital Objects
  • Digital Preservation
  • Practical Experiences
  • Professional Matters Arising, Options for the Future and Resolutions

• Personal Information Lifecycles: Creator,... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Preserving Your Digital Memories

Digital Preservation -dot- gov’s What You Can Do page : highlights your biggest digital at-risk items: email, computer files, storage disks, digital files, and the needle-in-a digital haystack problem of finding what you want in a pile of digital material.

Preserving a digital object is not the same as preserving, say, a book or photograph. You can put a book on a shelf or a photo in a box and (if kept dry and safe) look at it 50 years later. The same is not true with a digital object. This is why, in many cases, digital materials are considered more fragile than physical ones.

OMG! You can take a DID YOU KNOW? quiz, too.*

*I took it. Missed one because I was thinking more of my own “don’t break the web” habits than, say, how quickly news stories disappear from news websites.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Archiving Geospace

Kewl! UCSB Librarian Named “Pioneer of Digital Preservation” … by the Library of Congress. The pioneer? Larry Carver. At first glance (all I’ve taken), it looks like a cross between Google Earth and an über reference librarian.

“Geospatial technology in the context of libraries is to create software to search for information by pointing to a place on the Earth’s surface and — say using the Internet — ask what data, books, art, etc. is available for that spot or location. It searches by using longitude/latitude coordinates to look for information about that spot. So, the technology is a complex software that can search over millions of maps, aerial photographs, satellite imagery, or any other information that... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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CDs and DVDs: Tons of good info

The Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs, A guide for librarians and archivists. Found while researching the layer-cake sandwich of materials in an optical disk. Disk structure page. Did you know that the top side of a CD-R is thin and fragile? I mighta mentioned it before, but this underscores it, in a big way.

Also of note: the tests for aging and shelf-life of CDs and DVDs that you can burn yourself is that their pre-writing shelf life is limited to some 5 years or so. By all means, stock up, but don’t stock up too much.

Gold disks are the best. But that’s a topic for another post.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Archiving • Digitality • Longevity
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Motion picture sci/tech report on archiving

[updated] Hollywood Reporter reports that (the Oscar organization)’s Science/Tech council’s released 64-page report on archiving. From the looks of it, the limits of digital are being manifest. I’d like to look closer to see how much of an overlap there is for motion picture industry’s archiving existing work and how to preserve audio and visual recordings that are born digital.

Update [18 November]: I went to the web site and inquired if the paper was available. Not in downloadable form, but if I supplied my name and address, they’d send me a copy. I did. The paper just arrived. It’s 74 pages (full color, nice production!) I’ll give it a read and report on any findings relevant to people doing family oral history.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Longevity
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Family Visiting Headaches thanks to Digital Tools

At a family gathering, an internet cafe: “I wasn’t a house host anymore, I was running a Kinko’s. […] with a house brimming with guests, a cousin cornered me in my office with a multimedia challenge. She had brought a DVD made from family movies shot in the early 1930s. I was able to play it on my computer, but I ran aground trying to make a copy of it.”

Uh oh, I recognize myself there!

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Tribal Linguistic History using Digital Tools

Chuksani-speaking Native Americans preserve language using military-tech translators. This is what happens when speakers of a nearly extinct language get their hands on the latest DoD-inspired smart electronic gadgets. [via Dangerousmeta]

Jane Wyatt, 62, of Coarsegold, and her sister, Holly, 65, were among six tribal members who gathered Friday across the street from the Picayune Rancheria’s busy Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino in Coarsegold to try out a newly acquired “Phraselator.”

The electronic translator was developed just a few years ago from technology used for military translators, said Don Thornton of Thornton Media Inc., based in Banning. Thornton Media is working with 70 tribes in the United States and Canada to preserve native languages, he said.

“What’s my name?” he asked the box in his hand. He pressed another button and it replied in what Thornton said was Chukchansi.

The Wyatt sisters learned the unwritten Chukchansi language at home while they were growing up in the Madera County foothills. Chukchansi is one of many native California dialects considered to be nearly extinct.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Compact Disc celebrates 25th birthday

First discs rolled off presses August 17, 1982. So, if digital lasts forever.. or 5 years, whichever comes first, CDs may (may!) last forever.

The news story follows the way that CDs changed the music industry.. the rise.. and, with other digital formats, the fall. But the part that interests me the most are the techno-geeky deets about how the CD came to be, well, the CD:

Yet it had been a risky technical endeavor to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips’ labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s.

“When... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Audio • Audio: Hardware • Digitality
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(UPDATED) Storyofmylife.com goes beta: Their Terms of Service Stopped Me Cold

The promise of storyofmylife.com is compelling. Store information about your life. Forever. They’re thinking way far ahead— they’ve established a non-profit foundation to store the stories in perpetuity. Sounds great. But I’m not going to use the site. (Well, beyond a quick signup and look see.) The Terms of Service has a big gotcha in it: You grant storyofmylife.com and its parent company, Eravita, a 6% (minimum) royalty of any money you make on the proceeds of any commercial creative endeavors of the story of your own life.

UPDATE: I heard from the site’s COO. They’ve changed the TOS and deleted the objectionable part. Continue reading the original post and, at the end, the relevant portion of email from Storyofmylife.com’s COO.

The TOS was brought to my attention by my friend Cynthia, who visited the site the first day it was open.

Today’s the first day I’ve had a chance to visit, and I’m rockin’ back on my heels. I’m scared to even sign up to see what is behind it. 

Here’s the part of their TOS in the big capital letters (side note: Why oh why does the most important stuff get printed in all caps, which, when presented in... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Family History Software • Longevity • Personal History
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Digitization Resources

I could spend a good, long day getting lost in these Digitization Resources links by Hurst Associates at Digitization 101. From a workshop Jill Hurst-Wahl led at the Comptuers in Libraries conference.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Links • Longevity
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The Lost last 20 years; and a plea for paper (!!!)

1980-2000 has disappeared into the ether. Sorry. The history that’s being written right now does not have this kind of sensory fulness (if it’s being saved at all): “I have recently spent many hours in the National Archives, ferreting through the wartime records of MI5. The sheer richness of written material is overwhelming: letters, memos, telephone transcripts, diaries, scribbled notes in the margins. You can smell the pipe smoke and personalities wafting off the pages.”

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Longevity
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History Digitized (and Abridged) Follow-up

A follow-up post (read my previous) with various responses to the Katie Hafner article on History Digitized.

But before I do, I’ll offer my own, small what-if thought about how to get a bigger budget to digitize historical artifacts: I know of efforts and companies moving into this space. What they do: Digitizing Your Memories. Your Personal History. (Heck, this site is also an effort in this direction). Suppose that the players in this space were to create a fund from a small portion of proceeds of each company? The fund would underwrite digitization efforts. It’d never get as big as the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, but it’d be focused on This One Thing.

Speaking of Bill Gates, David Rothman compares libraries to the steel industry (once a giant, now a weak shadow of its former self), concentrating on library budgets in a “follow the money.” What’s the library budget per person? He’s got the goods. Incidentally, Andrew Carnegie, who founded (funded?) so many libraries, got his money from steel. Rothman looks at the benefactor Bill Gates, and what his fund is buying (computing equipment) and what it is not (digitizing the data, the... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • History • Longevity
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History: If it isn’t digital, it doesn’t exist

History: Digitized and Abridged. Not everything will get digitized. And the non-digital will be overlooked. This NYTimes article by Katie Haffner provides a fascinating (and sobering) twist on the trend toward digitality. [via Dave Winer, Scripting News] It’s very expensive to transfer all those archives of artifacts into digital form. Who will support the digitizing of historical artifacts? And how much stuff — and history— will get “lost” as an increasingly-digital-aware public overlooks the items that aren’t in digital form?

While the Internet boom has made information more accessible and widespread than ever, that very ubiquity also threatens records and artifacts that do not easily lend themselves to digitization — because of cost, but also because Web surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts.

The article touches on matters of copyright. Copyright laws—which have extended the term of copyright from the original 7 years... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • History • Longevity
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Save My Memories

A website devoted to longevity and preservation of digital photographs. A site put together by the International Imaging Industry Association (I3A). Cause you want to “remember the day in pictures” but not have your digital images go to “file heaven”— that location the bits go when your disk drive crashes or you accidentally erase the files.
[via Digitzation 101 via Richard Hess]

And while digital technologies have changed the way we capture and share photos, the desire to safeguard our visual heritage today, and in the future, remains essentially the same.

The companies that comprise the International Imaging Industry Association, or I3A, understand this all too well. That’s why we created this site—to help you understand how to protect and preserve your photographic memories for years to come.

The issues with digital preservation of photographs are bascially the same as the issues... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Longevity • Photographs
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