The University of Virginia Magazine recently published “Born Digital” discussing preservation of born-digital materials in the UVa Library.
Increasingly tasked with preserving materials that started out in digital formats and do not have a physical copy, UVa librarians are figuring out “What is the best way to save materials when the pace of technology so often makes the hardware and software on which they were created obsolete?”
“In the past, notable people would give you their papers,” says Bradley Daigle, director of digital curation services for the University of Virginia Library. “Now Thomas Jefferson 2.0 hands over a hard drive.”
The library is also collecting material that was never on disk, such as websites and Twitter feeds created surrounding the controversy over President Teresa Sullivan’s resignation last summer.
The article includes tips to authors and artists interested in saving their own work for posterity:
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1. Back up your data – save a copy on an external hard drive or use a cloud service.
- images: TIFF or uncompressed JPEG
- text: PDF/A or backward-compatible version of Word (.doc, not .docx)
- audio: Broadcast wave (WAV)
- digital video: highest resolution your camera will produce.
2. Make informed decisions about how you create documents; some suggestions:
3. Save different drafts of your work instead of overwriting them.
To read the full article, click over to the University of Virginia Magazine.
Disc 0421, Papers of Alan Cheuse, 1976-1987, Accession #10726, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.