Description: Here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, we take pride in preserving the Institution’s history, including its sizable web presence. While various offices at the Smithsonian create and back up the contents of their websites, the Archives also crawls each website using Heritrix, an open-source tool created by the Internet Archive, to capture content in an archival format.
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: Many of us read, write and send emails every day, but when did it all start at the Smithsonian? In 1980 Smithsonian staff had typewriters and telephones on their desk, with one or two FAX machines per office. The Smithsonian operated a single general purpose computer, the Honeywell mainframe, for all Smithsonian data processing applications and which did not include an 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 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: [caption id="attachment_8323" align="aligncenter" width="448" caption="Smithsonian employees attend the 2010 Smithsonian Digitization Fair. Photograph by Michael Barnes."][/caption] For two days in mid-September, Smithsonian Institution employees gathered for a digitization fair to share ideas and hear about some neat projects. Even those who work here are impressed by