Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections (2010)
Filed under report | Tags: · archive, cultural heritage, digital forensics, forensics, library, preservation
“While the purview of digital forensics was once specialized to fields of law enforcement, computer security, and national defense, the increasing ubiquity of computers and electronic devices means that digital forensics is now used in a wide variety of cases and circumstances. Most records today are born digital, and libraries and other collecting institutions increasingly receive computer storage media as part of their acquisition of “papers” from writers, scholars, scientists, musicians, and public figures. This poses new challenges to librarians, archivists, and curators—challenges related to accessing and preserving legacy formats, recovering data, ensuring authenticity, and maintaining trust. The methods and tools developed by forensics experts represent a novel approach to these demands. For example, the same forensics software that indexes a criminal suspect’s hard drive allows the archivist to prepare a comprehensive manifest of the electronic files a donor has turned over for accession.
This report introduces the field of digital forensics in the cultural heritage sector and explores some points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining born-digital cultural heritage materials and those charged with collecting and maintaining legal evidence.”
Written by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, Gabriela Redwine, with research assistance from Rachel Donahue
Publisher Council on Library and Information Resources, pub149, December 2010
ISBN 9781932326376
93 pages
PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-12-6)
Comment (0)Book-ish Territory: A Manual of Alternative Library Tactics (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · city, decentralization, diy, everyday, knowledge, knowledge production, library, urbanism
“This project aims to challenge the model of the institutionalized library, calling for a new decentralized system. The fundamental characteristics of a library and a city are the same: they both serve as spaces of exchange and encounter. Dispersing library content throughout the city would be of mutual benefit to the library and city: opportunities for informational exchange and casual encounter would dramatically increase.” (from introduction)
Published in May 2011
208 pages
via publicpraxis.com
PDF (single PDF, 24 MB, no OCR, low quality, updated on 2014-12-22)
View online (Issuu.com)
Jean Noël Jeanneney: Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View From Europe (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · archive, google, internet, library, politics, search
The recent announcement that Google will digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long-dreamed-of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infringement and unanticipated effects on the business of research and publishing.
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as a far more troubling aspect of Google’s Library Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world’s cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that Google’s unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad. This danger is made evident by a Google book search the author discusses here—one run on Hugo, Cervantes, Dante, and Goethe that resulted in just one non-English edition, and a German translation of Hugo at that. An archive that can so easily slight the masters of European literature—and whose development is driven by commercial interests—cannot provide the foundation for a universal library.
As a leading librarian, Jeanneney remains enthusiastic about the archival potential of the Web. But he argues that the short-term thinking characterized by Google’s digital repository must be countered by long-term planning on the part of cultural and governmental institutions worldwide—a serious effort to create a truly comprehensive library, one based on the politics of inclusion and multiculturalism.
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2007
ISBN 0226395774, 9780226395777
Length 92 pages