More and more I’ve been hearing stories of activities that sound everyday enough, such as software upgrades and file transfers between servers, that go horribly awry. Upgrades are incompatible with older files or files created with a different software and those legacy files are corrupted or become inaccessible… Directory structures are changed during a migration or systems clean up and relationships or dependencies are lost… Important folders are not moved to a new server or are deleted during the application of a retention policy…

This is where you, fellow archivists, professional small collections managers, librarians, students, history buffs, Americans, or American enthusiasts come in to help preserve America’s history.

Ah, Memorial Day Weekend — the traditional beginning to the marketing of summer. In New York this means one thing: the city will now be overwhelmed by the invasive stench of garbage being baked and steamed by the heat and humidity.

The historical record preserved in archives informs us of What-Was, but, of equal importance, it reminds us that What-Is Wasn’t-Always.

Little known fact: I was a middle school Chubby Bunny champion. A moment of pride? Perhaps not, but when my only other award to that date was 2nd Place Most Interesting Cake in a Cub Scout cake bake off, I was eager to win something.

I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but I’m a strong believer that online access to cultural materials is an excellent thing and I wholly support it. What we often don’t consider is that the way we can support these efforts further is to utilize them.

I like to think that archivists, despite our focus on the past, are typically a step ahead of the general culture because we always have to have the future in mind at the same time. That being the case, I feel we should already be thinking ahead of where initiatives like data.gov are and be considering how we can be more open in ways beyond content and access.

We chose to tell success stories because there seems to be plenty of focus on the opposite as people get caught up in the list of problems laid out ahead, almost inversing the old quote about success having a thousand fathers. Making people aware of the challenges faced in media archiving has its place in garnering support, but maintaining that backing and further encouraging its growth means showing the positive results of support.

We all know the drill: an e-mail comes through the listserv reminding us that the deadline for the Such & Such Grant for Thus & Thus is two weeks away. This sends us barreling headlong in a mad dash to ferret out some project, any project to cobble together some sort of application for…Or we sit and, before deleting the e-mail from our inbox, think, “Aw, man, I gotta apply for that next year…”

The YADA! Archiving & Preservation Grants Calendar (YADA!Cal) is a freely available listing of deadlines, reminders, links, and short descriptions of grants available for media archiving and preservation projects. AVPS has aggregated the grant information and is publishing it using the .ics file format via iCal Exchange, a free clearinghouse for the publishing of internet [...]