At this point, every year is huge. Every year that passes, every year we dither away by not taking action to reformat, more and more media shifts into the high risk zone where it becomes less and less likely that we will be able play it back and transfer it. read more

Most things are not great. Most things are not even good. This does not mean that the non-great do not deserve to be saved -- each collection has its own mission and reasoning -- be it does infer that, of the masses and masses of content we create, there is a steep curve measuring usefulness. read more

The worst part of my job is dealing with rubber bands in collections. No exaggeration. I am not afraid to say I hate them. I absolutely detest them. That wasn't always the case. I used to have bags of them around when I had a paper route. Always carried bunches in my pocket, futzing around ... read more

We were excited to see Part 1 of Jonathan Minard's documentary Archive -- a work about the "future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale" -- released the other day. Jonathan is a Fellow at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, and ... read more

In essence, it is a way of thinking about achieving a goal that seems overwhelming when only the end point is considered. Rather, it's about breaking down the process into doable chunks and recognizable milestones. In this way, I consider two basic questions: Where am I starting? What are my goals? read more

One has to assume that a major distrust of the shift to digital reformatting and preservation is the feeling that we're merely redoing work that will need to be redone again when the next format comes along. This may be especially galling to those who fairly recently reformatted video or film to something like ... read more

Equally inspirational to me was not just what people are doing but how they are approaching it. Namely, many projects were following a rapid release, responsive model that embraces the reality of failure, similar to many contemporary software development models. read more

In my personal life I actively work against saving things. I actively work because it is difficult to not save. Because the opposite of saving is wasting or over-consumption, and those are amoral or unethical. Because there are many urges and compulsions to save. Because not saving involves making a decision, and decisions might be ... read more

If decay is a beautiful thing, why are we working so hard to preserve all this archival material? A facetious statement, perhaps, but an exaggeration that underscores the fact that aesthetics guide many of the decisions we make as archivists and preservationists. We may claim it is for research, or integrity, or, to use the European ... read more

Another year in the circular filing cabinet, another year in review. Only difference from the other ones is, I'm right. Most Interesting Acquisition: One's Personal Archive From Twitter Though it hasn't quite been completely rolled out, Twitter's announcement that they were targeting year-end for release of tool that would allow users to download ... read more