In this article, the author discusses how the Berklee College of Music preserves its past and learns for the future. Though the library has received support from the college administration for the creation of an archive, it has been difficult for the interest in preserving the college's history to compete with more urgent needs, such as being able…

Recent years have seen an explosion of the number of institutions involved in or beginning to think about web archiving. Many National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) members, as well as other universities, historical societies, and state and local governments, have recognized the need for and importance of preserving a variety of web content…

Managing a library collection at the national level follows quite a different set of assumptions than hold for typical academic or public libraries. These collections, often comprehensive of all materials published in a country, press the limits of scale in terms of the sizes of collections. A national library collection might, for example, stand…

Charles E. Bracker was a professor of botany and plant pathology at Purdue University from 1964 to 1999. His late wife, Anri, was an orchid enthusiast who began collecting and housing orchids in the 1980s. In 2009, Bracker's 30,000 digital orchid photographs were donated to Ball State University Libraries, where both of this article's authors…

The Butte Free Public Library was established in 1894. At that time, head librarian J. Davies published a catalog of the opening collection. Two fires and one flood later, many of the monographs from that original collection list have, remarkably, survived. Because of this, in part, the library, now known as the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library…

In 2009 the University of Washington (UW) Libraries special collections received funding for the digital preservation of its audio indigenous language holdings. The university libraries, where the authors work in various capacities, had begun digitizing image and text collections in 1997. Because of this, at the onset of the project, workflows (a…

Large-scale projects such as the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) send out crawlers to gather snapshots of much of the web. This massive collection of archived websites may include content of interest to one's patrons. But if librarians want to control exactly when and what is archived, relying on someone else to do the archiving is not ideal.…

Description of the History Computerization Project, which is being developed for the exchange of information between researchers, librarians, archivists, museum curators, preservation groups, and historical societies, focuses on workshops that teach the use of computer database management for historical cataloging and research. (LRW)

In 2004, Georgia State University (GSU) Library's Southern Labor Archives, located in Atlanta, began working with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) to plan for the digitization of the union's 105-year-old journal. With generous financial support from IAM, the authors, who are GSU staff members, began…