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National Preservation Week

“My LIFE’s in there!” Personal Digital Archiving and Saving your Stuff

Apr 25th, 2013
by Lisa (Digital Information Management Program).
No comments yet
Fire-damaged Laptop

Courtesy of flickr user connectologist

It’s National Preservation Week. I posted earlier this week about our redesigned digital preservation website, and about a document geared toward professionals managing digital collections.

But what if you’ve just got family photos taken with your phone, a Facebook account, and some old letters you’ve scanned? What if you don’t do this for a living, but want to do the right thing for your future?

Well, we can help you there, too.

Preservation Week Exhibit from 2012

The advice from the exhibit we had last year is still relevant and hopefully not too overwhelming. Take a look at the .pdfs in this blog post from April 2012.

Library of Congress’ Personal Digital Archiving Site

If you’re ready for step-by-step instructions on scanning, preserving email, and saving your digital videos, the Library of Congress’ Personal Digital Archiving website is the place for you.

“What about Facebook? Twitter? My LIFE’s in there!”

Both Facebook and Twitter let you download your content. While those sites seem like they’ll be around forever, people might have thought that about EveryBlock, Meebo, AOL Hometown, and a host of other sites. So anytime you put unique content into a social network or other online product, investigate ways to back up that data if you want to save it for the future.

Got a more specific question about saving your personal stuff? Add a comment below or contact us at digital.info@ncdcr.gov and we’d be happy to help.

Preservation Metadata for Digital Objects, NC Style

Apr 24th, 2013
by Lisa (Digital Information Management Program).
1 comment

PMDO logoIt’s National Preservation Week. On Monday, we announced a redesigned Digital Preservation Education website. Today, we’ve got another announcement specifically for North Carolina libraries, archives, and other institutions with digital files they want to preserve: we’re releasing a revised NC PMDO, or NC Preservation Metadata for Digital Objects.

Who needs the NC PMDO?

If you’re creating a digital collection by scanning images or documents, don’t just describe those files and throw them on the internet or a hard drive. Preserve your hard work! To help do that, preservation metadata is a must. The NC PMDO gives you a list of required, recommended, and optional metadata elements to record. If you’re completely new to metadata, try this brief description.

How do I use the NC PMDO?

You can record metadata in a number of ways – maybe just in a spreadsheet or database, maybe in a specialized content management system. We’ve tried to make the schema user friendly, with lots of examples. If you have more questions, just contact us.

How is this edition of the NC PMDO different from the first one?

This latest edition addresses born-digital files as well as scanned images. We also think it’s a little more streamlined – some elements that were more burdensome to record have been removed.

But we used the first edition of the NC PMDO. What do we do now?

Don’t worry. You can keep using the first version – many of the fields map to the elements in the new schema (see Appendix A in the new edition). You’re also welcome to adopt the new schema if you’d like to scale back on the amount of preservation metadata you record.

Special thanks to our NC PMDO draft reviewers at North Carolina State University Libraries and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.

CINCH – digital preservation … easier

Apr 25th, 2012
by Dean Farrell (Digital Information Management Program).
1 comment

Does your organization have electronic files that need to be preserved? Would copying them all manually be a nightmare? Are you unsure as to what’s actually in each file?  We thought so.  We have the same problems.  That’s why we’re developing a tool, CINCH(Capture, Ingest, & Checksum tool), to help automate the process of  file preservation.

How does it work? Well, all you have to do is login into CINCH and upload a list of files for CINCH to process.  Then you can just kick back and wait for notification that your files are ready.  CINCH will take your file list and perform the following actions:

  1. Download each file, taking care to not change such information as the file’s last modified date.
  2. Virus check each file.
  3. Create a checksum for each file.
  4. Extract the metadata (title, author, keywords, dates and times) embedded in each file.
  5. Package everything up in a zip file for you to download.  In addition to your files, the file-level metadata, any errors that occurred during processing and a list of the actions run on each file are included.

With repeated use CINCH will also be able to detect whether a file is a duplicate of a file you’ve previously listed for processing.

When CINCH is done processing your file list you’ll receive an email that your files are ready.  You just need to log back in and download them.  Your files are now ready to be placed into whatever preservation system you wish.
CINCH currently supports the following file types: Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, PDF documents, JPEG, PNG, GIF, text and CSV files.

How do I get started? If your organization is affiliated with NCLIVE you’re in luck.  CINCH will be provided to you as a free, hosted service.  You merely need to contact us and we can set you up with an account.  If you’re not affiliated with NCLIVE don’t worry you can download and run CINCH yourself.  You can find the needed source code and documentation here.  CINCH is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  If you want to learn more about CINCH checkout the following links:
http://cinch.nclive.org
http://digitalpreservation.ncdcr.gov/cinch/index.html

Archive your Facebook Data with this NEW Tutorial

Apr 24th, 2012
by Lisa (Digital Information Management Program).
No comments yet

What better time than Preservation Week to release our brand new video tutorial: Saving your Facebook Data.  If you add it all up, Americans spend an estimated 100,000 YEARS per month on Facebook. Those posts and videos of today are the letters and home movies of yesterday. However while we carefully box up photos, many people don’t even consider making a backup of their Facebook data to ensure it is preserved for their children or relatives to come. That’s why we’ve made this brief video that walks you through the easy process.

Following on the success of our first series of videos on file naming, this new “Inform U” video steps you through the easy process of saving your Facebook profile information, posts, photos, and videos for future generations. Let us know what you think, or if you have any questions, in the comments below.

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