“If we can accept our imperfections as they are, then we can use them as part of the path.”
~ Chögyam Trungpa
fun bunch
The initial plan was to talk about my seriously awesome new fridge that was delivered today. That was, until I got to work where Jen Bartlett invited me to talk to the digital humanities class about Kentucky’s Digital Newspaper Program (KDNP). I ended up talking more about digital preservation, but that seemed okay. My sense was that the class didn’t realize the many facets of preservation involved with digital content. Not a surprise. Most people think any flatbed scanner equals digitization, and then they never give a second thought to how to care for the data long term. You wouldn’t think newspapers would lead me down this path, but working on the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) for eight years (and KDNP for another five) built it into my librarian DNA. Almost everything I’ve done at UK has been connected to digital content creation and care – from texts to A/V. It’s been amazing to watch the technologies evolve. I’ve been really lucky to land in a field that does some pretty cutting edge work, providing access to materials that, without technological advances, would have been accessible to only a few hearty researchers. That there are now classes focused solely on ways to reinterpret, repackage, or repurpose this material and make something even more meaningful from it makes everything we do feel complete. The sky’s the limit in the digital humanities field, and it was great fun to spend a little time with this class today. I hope they use our newspapers for a great project.
No responses yet