Clik here to view.
Storing Digital Data in DNA
Reported in Science today, scientists George Church, Yuan Gao and Sriram Kosuri report that they have written a 5.27-megabit “book” in DNA – encoding far more digital data in DNA than has ever been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Library of Brewer’s Yeast
What the seed vault in Svalbard does for the world’s plants, the Cara Technology’s Research Laboratory in England does for yeast. The Guardian’s Word of Mouth Blog recently published a feature on this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Preserving Virtual Worlds
“This is our history, and just a handful of people are saving it.” — PixelVixen707, screen name of “Rachael Webster,” a fictional character in the alternate reality game Personal Effects: Dark Art...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rick Prelinger Seminar Primer
“Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 7” Tuesday December 11, 02012 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco Guerrilla archivist and “media archaeologist” Rick Prelinger has built his career on uncovering,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
TimesMachine: “All the News That Was Fit to Print”
If you’re a fan of this video showing a years’ worth of front pages for NYTimes.com, or the Way Back Machine, which allows you to browse the internet of the past, you might also love a project released...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Seeds Are the New Books
The Basalt Public Library in western Colorado has recently started lending seeds out to members. The members “borrow” the seeds with their library card, grow the plants, and harvest the best fruits’...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reviving and Restoring Digital Art
With the ever-accelerating evolution of hardware and software, we stand to lose much more than reels of data. A vast collection of computer art risks slipping into digital darkness, as well. Concerned...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The First 250 years of the “Biblioteca Palatina di Parma”
We’ve got another long-term dispatch from our man-on-the-ground in Italy, Davide Bocelli: We all know that libraries tend to burn. It has been true for the Library of Alexandria and even for the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
World’s Largest and Oldest Audio Archive
Over the past 12 years, audio archivists at the The Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have digitized 7,513 hours of analog recordings of natural sounds. The collection houses...
View ArticleO’Reilly Talks about Digital Preservation
Former SALT speaker Tim O’Reilly recently shared the video of a talk he gave on digital preservation at the Library of Congress in 02011. Discussing some of his own “personal failures” to archive...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Almost half of the world’s languages are endangered
On the blog of Long Now’s Rosetta Project, intern Karin Wiecha describes the recently published findings of a major linguistics research effort: ELCat uses the metaphor of biodiversity to illustrate...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Digital Public Library of America
A digital library that makes published material available to anyone with an internet connection, free of charge: a realistic possibility, or a utopian fantasy? Last April, a contributor to the MIT...
View Article10 Petabytes and Growing: The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive seeks to offer universal access to all knowledge. Jonathan Minard and Deepspeed Media recently created Archive, a short documentary exploring how they’re slowly but steadily...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A New Dimension (or Two?) for Long-Term Data Storage
A group of scientists at the University of Southampton is pushing the frontier of long-term data storage technology to a new level. At a recent Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics in San José, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Art & The Art of Archiving at New York’s New Museum
From July 17 to September 8 of this year, the New Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is hosting XFR STN (read ‘transfer station’), an “open-door artist-centered media archiving project.” A...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Neil Gaiman on Libraries and the Future
Books connect our future and our past, teaching us about what came before and encouraging us to imagine what might yet be. Because of this, reading and libraries remain essential even in our...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Cure for Broken Links and Dead Dot-Coms
“The Internet echoes with the empty spaces where data used to be.” – Alexis Rossi from the Wayback Machine The Internet Archive recently unveiled a new plan to fix broken links utilizing the Wayback...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reviving and Restoring Lost Sounds
In 02008 Kevin Kelly called for movage (as opposed to storage) as the only way to archive digital information: “Proper movage means transferring the material to current platforms on a regular basis—...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Laura Welcher Speaks at Contemporary Jewish Museum This Sunday
How do public archives, as collections of cultural artifacts, shape our collective memory? And how is this changing as new digital tools make it ever easier for scholars and artists to access these...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Retrocomputing Brings Warhol’s Lost Digital Art Back to Life
In 01985, Andy Warhol used an Amiga 1000 personal computer and the GraphiCraft software to create a series of digital works. Warhol’s early computer artworks are now viewable after 30 years of...
View Article
