The Preserving our Digital Heritage: Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program stated that the average length of a website is 44 days. That really surprised me. I think the preservation of born digital material is an important issue right now, and it’s only going to get more important as our world increasingly becomes more digital. It is really an overwhelming issue with so many hurdles and potential issues.
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I came across a project of Berry College and Bloomsberg University this week called the Martha Berry Digital Archive. The site is built on Omeka and a plugin the developers created for the site called “Crowd-Ed”. The plugin allows the digitization of their entire collection to be crowdsourced. In other words, the archive digitizes the documents and users annotate, tag, and fill in the metadata for each item.
Crowdsourcing has been gaining popularity recently and has become a way for archives to digitize mass amounts of data fairly quickly and at a minimal cost.
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Yesterday I attended WordCamp Baltimore, a WordPress developers conference. Aaron Jorbin, a well-known WordPress developer in the D.C. area, gave the keynote address which was about open source platforms and the open source community. If you aren’t familiar with the “.org” version of WordPress, it is open source and free to anyone who wants to use, modify, or develop the software. Jorbin’s keynote was entitled “Citizenship in the Open Source World” and he talked a lot about the responsibilities and the rights of a citizen in the “Open Source World.
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