Description: Today is the day to shine the spotlight on electronic records, as Oct 10 marks the sixth Electronic Records Day.Sponsored by the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), this day is “to raise awareness among state government agencies, the general public, related professional organizations, and other stakeholders about the crucial role electronic records play in their world.” CoSA
Description: Open source tools, CERP, JHOVE, DROID, Heritrix, for electronic records archivists to use in preserving digital files like WAV, PST, websites, and email.
Description: Do you still work with 3.5-inch diskettes? How about 5.25-inch floppy disks and Zip disks? I do. As an electronic records archivist at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I spend most of my time working with digital information to help ensure it will be accessible in 5, 25, or even 100 years from now. Born-digital materials arrive at the archives in a variety of ways (CDs,
Description: In the course of my internship at the Smithsonian Archives’ Digital Services Division I’ve worked with myriad digital records, converting both new material and past accessions into formats that can be more easily preserved. But the most exciting part of my time here came when I was given my very own accession, the Devra G. Kleiman Papers, to work on. My task was to copy all of
Description: Several SIA Archivists participated in the 2012 Society of American Archivists confernence, discussing such topics as archiving websites, Encoded Archival Context (EAD) and the Fieldbook Project.
Description: In celebration of Archives Month, join us Monday, October 27th, 10am to 4pm ET, where four of our archivists specializing in audio/visual material, photos, and digital records (or electronic records) will be on the Smithsonian's Facebook page to answer questions about your own archival collections. Questions from our readers in the past have ranged from storing letter and
Description: In addition to physical damage and deterioration of storage media, the technological complexity and dependency of electronic records make them uniquely vulnerable to loss, corruption, and alteration (both accidental and malicious). To achieve long-term preservation of fragile born-digital materials, digital archivists need a plan.
Description: The comical infographic of the week that's hitting a nerve with electronic records archivists! [via xkcd]Our National Museum of the American Indian is asking the public to submit design ideas for a memorial honoring American Indian military service. [via Navy Times] The oldest museum of African American culture, the DuSable Museum, was founded by Margaret Taylor-Burroughs in