I present a draft syllabus for Projects in Digital Archives for comment and consideration. The fall semester at Pratt starts next week. We are shifting our attention from digitization to digital preservation this time. Students will work on a real-world website preservation project. Most of the readings are specs and standards, but we are reading The Social Life of Information to ground our thinking.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) has released a report on media literacy. They describe A Global Imperative: The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit as a call to action to people working in any aspect of education. They talk about 21st century literacy as
the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms.
They say that one-way relationships, like that of the reader and author, will give way to conversations. In the spirit of that dialog, I am tracking visitors with another brilliant Google Maps tool.
A few blogs focusing on digital preservation:
The Rogue Librarian runs on WordPress. The CSS layout for this design is based on Boredom by Topi Peltonen. The typeface in the masthead is JM Libris, and the tagline is set in Filosofia. The background art is taken from La Plante et ses Applications Ornementales, a selection of decoration and ornament compiled by Eugène Grasset as presented in the NYPL Digital Gallery.
Jeffrey and I had dinner with a web superstar who told us that we were both early bloggers. I had always though of myself as a Johnny-come-lately, but I was blogging by the end of 2000. The Wayback Machine has my first design which features my mother’s high school senior picture. She does not like the photograph, but I do. The CMS was one that I slapped together with ColdFusion and MS Access. I could not create something as cool and raw today. The garage band days of the web are gone, and the ensuing professionalism has taken some of the life out of what was once a punk rock medium. That was a lifetime ago.