OCLC published “Defining Born Digital” which is a short 4-page intro, and isn’t in any way meant to be comprehensive. The document doesn’t (and can’t without being much longer) begin to address many areas and doesn’t include references for further reading. For anyone interested in working with born digital materials, publications from the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) are essential reading: Acid-Free Bits Born-Again Bits These publications are essential because electronic literature defines and redefines “born digital”. Electronic literature does so a highly experimental creative form that pushes the boundaries of existing technologies, creates new technologies, and uses/connects technologies in new ways that creates new conceptualRead More →

Matthew Kirschenbaum is one of the authors on this report and he’s also one of the authors on the Preserving Digital Worlds report and the author of the brilliant Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (which rightfully won MLA and SHARP book awards, and many others). I’ve been eagerly awaiting this report, and now it’s out in time for holiday reading! News Release: Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, Gabriela Redwine with research assistance from Rachel Donahue PDF Download of Complete Report (1 MB file) >> While the purview of digital forensics was once specializedRead More →

News posting from here. Berkman Center Announces Digital Public Library Planning Initiative December 13, 2010 – The Berkman Center for Internet and Society today announced that it will host a research and planning initiative for a “Digital Public Library of America.” With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Berkman will convene a large and diverse group of stakeholders in a planning program to define the scope, architecture, costs and administration for a proposed Digital Public Library of America. “We’re grateful to Berkman for coordinating this historic effort to create a Digital Public Library of America and to fulfill the vision of an open, distributedRead More →

Digital Humanities Specialist 100% Academic Professional Position University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Library Duties and Responsibilities:  The University of Illinois Library conducts a variety of activities in support of digital humanities scholarship, including creation, delivery, curation and preservation of a wide variety of types of digital assets and tools.  Reporting to the Technical Architect for Repositories and Scholarly Communication, the Digital Humanities Specialist will assist with the planning, implementation and ongoing production of these digital collections and scholarly initiatives, with particular emphasis on project design, digitization workflows, and content and delivery systems.  The successful candidate will work across a number of humanities and SpecialRead More →

Job Posting: Digital Library Applications Programmer Position at the University of California, Santa Cruz Library The University of California, Santa Cruz Library will make available digital collections from the Grateful Dead Archive on  a cutting-edge website. This website will provide access to Grateful Dead Archive materials and tools to facilitate public contributions to the archive. This project will enable the university to convert a significant part of a traditional archive to digital form and make it available online while simultaneously experimenting with the impact of fostering, creating, and curating of a large, socially constructed archive. The website will support discovery, delivery, use and construction of theRead More →

These positions are all at the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Details and application instructions are here: https://jobs.illinois.edu/default.cfm?page=job&jobID=4592. Three Full-Time Positions Available: Starting as soon as possible after application deadline, funded for 5 years (NSF Ethics Resource Center and others as assigned) Starting as soon as possible after application deadline, funded for 14 months (NEH Emblematica Online and others as assigned) Starting March 16, 2011, funded for 18 months (IMLS Digital Collections and Content and others as assigned) Duties and Responsibilities: The successful candidates will be appointed to support current digital library grant-funded research projects being conducted at the GraingerRead More →

Announcement Below: The HASTAC 2011 International Conference has been rescheduled. It will now be held December 2-3, 2011. Our HASTAC network at the University of Michigan, led by our Steering Committee member Daniel Herwitz, and with regional assistance from SC member Julie Klein (Wayne State), has been meeting to plan for next year’s HASTAC International Conference. It’s still a year away but they have confirmed a date so you can mark your calendars: December 2-3, 2011. This conference promises to be bold, wide-ranging, and urgent. You won’t want to miss it! The event will be held in the North Quadrangle at University of Michigan, aRead More →

MPublishing at the University of Michigan Library seeks applications from postdoctoral candidates in the humanities for a two-year position that focuses on digital scholarship and publishing. The MPublishing CLIR Fellowship will provide an opportunity for an ambitious and curious Ph.D. recipient in the humanities to develop skills and experience as a publishing professional in an innovative library-based scholarly communication environment. Reporting to the Head of Publishing Services Outreach, the Fellow will assist with articulating, developing, and promoting publishing needs and publishing models. Specific activities may include: Researching publishing needs for the digital humanities and humanities publishing through surveys, listening sessions, and other research methods; implementingRead More →

FIU’s Wolfsonian Museum blog explains a wonderful assignment where students will select an individual object from the Wolfsonian collections for a project. Over the course of the semester-long project, the students will analyze the purpose of the object, investigate its social context and message, identify the artist and the artist’s aim in creating the piece, pair the historical artifact with a contemporary variant that shares a similar function in today’s society, and to explore the implications of social and technological change over time. This is a great assignment because students will learn about the specifics of their projects as well as about the Wolfsonian’s collections andRead More →

“Coding Early Naturalists’ Accounts into Long-Term Fish Community Changes in the Adriatic Sea (1800–2000)” is a new article in PLoS One by researchers who mined historical data from materials found in archives to understand “fish communities’ changes over the past centuries” which “has important implications for conservation policy and marine resource management” (Abstract).  The article explains the difficulty in integrating qualitative and anecdotal historical data with modern data, and their methodology for coding historical data. This article is a great example of how historical materials from archives support all research areas, including current and future scientific research. With so many archives and cultural heritage institutionsRead More →