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Life on the RV road should be about simplicity. However, for many of us, it isn't always so simple. We need to keep receipts for income tax purposes, keep copies of insurance policies, owners' manuals, genealogy documents, and much more. Where do you put all the paperwork? Since I spend much of my time in a motor home, I don't have room for filing cabinets or even an extra box for storing papers in a bedroom closet.
Russ and Tiña De Maris live full-time in a recreational vehicle and have written about a solution: they digitize everything and throw the paper away. Actually, I have been doing the same for several years now and recommend it to everyone, whether you live on the road or in a normal home. It simplifies your life and helps immensely in becoming organized. Having everything available at your fingertips within seconds, wherever you are, is a great convenience. I no longer have a need for filing cabinets or even boxes of papers. Yet I can find any scanned document within seconds, wherever I am.
Do you have home movies, audio and video tapes, printed photos, negatives or slides that are gathering dust in a closet? Would you like to have them converted to more modern media? PeggyBank.com is offering a service where you send in all your old media to the company (it will even provide the boxes) and the company will convert all of these items, for a fee, into digital formats and upload them to a free online "vault," usable from any computer with Web access. You can leave the items in the vault for viewing or you can download them to your own computer (or both). When the conversion is done, PeggyBank.com ships your original materials back to you.
Disclaimer: I have to say that I totally disagree with an article published yesterday in the Adelaide Now web site in Australia. Unfortunately, mis-information bounces all over the Internet and some people will actually believe this stuff. I feel that someone needs to write a rebuttal. The article in question was written by Claire Connelly of the News Limited Network and is published at http://goo.gl/8QmQ1. The article quotes Canadian information security consultant Robert Slade.
Mr. Slade is making public claims that historians will be facing a black hole when it comes to studying the 20th and 21st centuries because much of our digital history is stored on technology that no longer have devices to read them. He says the information stored on everything from floppy disks to CDs, mobile phones to cameras is at risk of being lost forever.
I will insist there are some serious flaws with Mr. Slade's theories. He conveniently overlooks processes that have been in place for years. Data has always been copied and updated by all well-managed data centers since the days of 80-column punch cards.
Lynn McCleary and other members of the Muscatine County Genealogical Society aren’t about to permit a brittle celluloid connection to Muscatine’s past to snap. 44 spools of Muscatine Journal microfilm, dating back to 1840, have been converted to digital versions for preservation purposes.
Microfilm, which is stored on spools that contain page after page of historical documents, is more prone to tear as it ages, said Bobby Fiedler, the library’s assistant director. “The microfilm is used a lot, and that’s when it starts to tear,” McCleary said. “Our concern is one day it will no longer be usable. It is a precious thing to have preserved.”
Dundee-based brightsolid’s work to digitise 40 million pages of historical newspapers has been recognised by ScotlandIS, the trade body for information and communications technologies (ICT) sector, as the most successful IT project of the year at the Digital Technology Awards Scotland. The award was made for brightsolid's mass digitisation project with the British Library.
Just months after the successful public launch of the British Newspaper Archive– which attracted more than a million searches on its first day - it has now been recognised by industry peers as a Scottish success story.
Writing in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation blog, Emily Reynolds described a recent talk by Kate Theimer of the popular blog ArchivesNext. Theimer is a prominent voice in the archival community, frequently writing and speaking about archival advocacy issues as well as the challenges and opportunities that technology and the Internet offer for cultural heritage institutions.
Theimer spoke on the subject of participatory archives, highlighting the ways that archives can use crowdsourcing projects to increase user engagement and understanding, while also enhancing the information and resources that they provide. The majority of well-known participatory archive projects allow users to add metadata to digital objects (in the form of tagging or transcription), and many successful examples of these projects have been undertaken by a wide range of institutions in recent years.
Do you wonder if cloud storage is a good option for your personal digital photographs? Do you have questions about metadata and file formats? Are you uneasy about the prospects of keeping your digital photos available for yourself and your family into the future? If so, you have lots of company.
On April 26, over 570 people participated in a web-based presentation about preserving digital photographs.
The J.A. Freitas Library is digitizing copies of 14 Portuguese-language newspapers published in California between 1885 and 1940. The library is owned and operated by the Supreme Council of the Portuguese Fraternal Society of America. Archivist Sonia Pacheco, of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, supervised the digitization.
The names and Cincinnati-area burial locations of soldiers who served in conflicts from the Revolutionary War to World War I are being made available online thanks to two genealogists who rescued records that were bound for the trash. Mary Remler and Jim Dempsey saved five priceless books from the Hamilton County Recorder’s dumpster.
A Works Progress Administration project in the 1930s cataloged that information from Hamilton County cemeteries in five books. The books had been microfilmed years ago but the microfilm was fading and a bit out of focus. The newly-discovered books can now be digitized and preserved online for everyone's use.
Lake County Recorder Michelle Fajman and the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society have announced a partnership to index the records from 5,840 books stored in the county recorder's office.
By law, the books must remain in the county recorder's office. But Fajman wants to back up the records and keep a copy off site in the event of a natural disaster, such as a tornado or flood. A digitized backup will also make it quicker to find records.
The diary of Grand Rapids for more than century is now in the hands of the people of Grand Rapids. MLive Media Group this spring has donated its entire print and photo archive collection belonging to the Grand Rapids Press to the Grand Rapids Public Museum, which will be the new caretaker of a collection now technically owned by the city.
The collection contains some materials dating back to the 1840s, including precursor newspapers to the Grand Rapids Press, which began printing as a daily newspaper in 1893.
For many years, people have kept their precious mementos — letters, photo albums, home movies and paper documents — as a link to their past, and a recognized tradition is to pass along these family treasures to future generations. In celebration of Preservation Week 2012, April 22-28, the Library of Congress is sponsoring a number of activities to share preservation strategies that help people care for their personal materials — and thereby pass them on.
R.C. Leavenworth and his employees and partners took more than 200,000 photographs of Lansing, Michigan during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Thousands of the negatives are now wrinkled, buckled, warped, fused together in bricks, deteriorated and deteriorating. They were made using cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate films — both chemically unstable and the former highly flammable — and stored for years under less-than-ideal conditions.
State Archivist Mark Harvey called the collection “the most complete photographic record of the city.”
If you are looking for military records from World War I and World War II as well as the years between those wars, you probably are already aware that many of the personnel records were destroyed in a fire on July 12, 1973. The National Personnel Records Center lost approximately 16 to 18 million Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF). No duplicate copies of these records were ever maintained, nor were microfilm copies produced. Neither were any indexes created prior to the fire. A complete listing of the records that were lost is not available.
The National Archives and Records Administration has unveiled its 715-year-old copy of the Magna Carta after a conservation effort removed old patches and repaired weak spots in the paper that holds the English declaration of human rights.
The National Archives unveiled the medieval document Thursday in a specially humidified glass and metal case. It is the only original Magna Carta in the United States and will return to public display Feb. 17.
Writing in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation Blog at http://goo.gl/TeY4b, Susan Manus describes several new videos from the Belgian project “Archipel.” The Archipel project is a recent collaboration by organizations in Belgium, to study digitization and digital preservation of cultural heritage materials.
Not only are the videos entertaining, they also make the point about the importance of digital preservation. The Archipel project team has produced five videos (listed near the top of the page), each focused on issues relating to the creation and management of digital materials, starting with an “overview” video of the project. The other videos focus on specific areas such as legal research (within the context of Belgian law, but also noting creative commons options), technical research (the construction of an archive for future sustainability, noting among other things, use of the PREMIS OWL standard) and social impact (the need for more online presence for Flemish performing arts, for example).
You can read more in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation Blog at http://goo.gl/TeY4b
Here's another example of how preserving information only on paper is high risk. Institute d'Egypte, a research center set up by Napoleon Bonaparte during France's invasion in the late 18th century, caught fire during clashes between protesters and Egypt's military over the weekend. It was home to a treasure trove of writings, most notably the handwritten 24-volume Description de l'Egypte, compiled during the 1798-1801 French occupation. Most of the 192,000 books, journals and writings were damaged beyond repair.
The research center caught fire during clashes between protesters and Egypt's military over the weekend.
The Executive Papers of Governor Thomas Jefferson, 1779-1781, have been named one of Virginia’s top ten endangered artifacts by the Virginia Association of Museums. The letters and manuscripts documenting Jefferson’s service as the second governor of Virginia address the challenges he faced during the Revolutionary War, the drafting of the Articles of Confederation, the negotiation of the boundaries of Virginia and her neighbors, and the dangers of the frontier. The papers are currently undergoing conservation treatments thanks in part to a $110,000 grant received from Save America’s Treasures. You can watch as a YouTube video shows Leslie Courtois, Senior Conservator with Etherington Conservation Services, as she works to restore these valuable records in the Library of Virginia’s conservation labs.
Twenty-six-year-old German immigrant August Liebelt first arrived in New Orleans in 1860. After serving during the Civil War, he migrated to Texas, settled on 80 acres and bult a cabin in 1869, and received a land grant in 1873. After leaving Travis County in 1881, he eventually lived his final years in Sherman, Texas, and died there in July 1911. His 15-foot by 17-foot, one-room, single-story loft cabin is now being relocated, thanks in part to a grant from Sears.
On November 20, contractors carefully relocated the 19th century Liebelt cabin from its original location tucked away behind oak trees far from the highway on south RR 620 to its new permanent location adjacent to Lakeway City Hall at 1102 Lohman’s Crossing.
If you want to keep family photographs or even scanned images of documents and books available for use by future generations, you'll be interested in an article by Bill LeFurgy that has been published in the Library of Congress' web site. Digital Preservation-Friendly File Formats for Scanned Images describes the better file formats to use. The article is essentially an introduction to a longer paper with the title, Sustainability of Digital Formats Planning for the Library of Congress Collections.
Quoting from the article:
"From a preservation standpoint, some digital file formats are better than others. The basic issue is how readable a format remains over the course of time and successive waves of technological change. The ideal format will convey its content accurately regardless of advances in hardware, software and other aspects of information technology.
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