October 2010 – Nancy McGovern has been involved in the preservation of digital content since the mid-1980s when she began working with electronic records at the U.S. National Archives.

Since then, she has been responsible for the preservation of digital content of all kinds, including digital archives, digital library collections, and research data. During that time, she has actively tracked the emergence of the digital preservation field with an increasingly comprehensive set of standards and practices as new content types require new or enhanced strategies.

In this issue:

*The Geospatial Multistate Archive and Preservation Partnership engages industry at the 2010 ESRI International User Conference

*Abbie Grotke of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program Web Archiving Team talks about web archiving projects at the Library of Congress

*A new video in the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Video Series is available: “Physical and Digital Preservation of the Waldeseemuller Map”

*David Brunton of the Library of Congress Repository Development Center talks about software development activities

*The European Planets project is featured in the latest “On the Leading Edge” profile

*A recent Computerworld article examined some of the issues surrounding archival storage

September 14, 2010 — The Library of Congress participated in Save Our African American Treasures , which was held in Topeka, Kan., during August 14-15. The National Museum of African American History and Culture sponsored the public event to offer advice about preserving personal collections.

September 24, 2010 — The Persistent Digital Archives and Library System research project has recently released an open source software tool that extracts email, attachments and other objects from Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) files, converting messages into XML.

September 24, 2010 — For those who use the Mozilla Firefox browser, you now have the option to time travel through the web. MementoFox is a free extension that users can add-on to their browsers.

September 24, 2010 — The American Political Science Association has awarded ContextMiner — created as part of the NDIIPP VidArch project — the 2010 Information Technology & Politics award for Best Political Science Website or Software.

September 28, 2010 — The Institute of Conservation and the Digital Preservation Coalition recently announced the shortlist for the prestigious Digital Preservation Award 2010. Several NDIIPP-supported projects have made the list.

October 5, 2010 — While collaboration among libraries, archives and museums has taken place for some time, challenges remain on the path to success.

This topic generated a great deal of insightful discussion at Yours, Mine, Ours: Leadership Through Collaboration, a recent meeting hosted at the Smithsonian Institution.

October 5, 2010 — The Smithsonian Institution hosted Yours, Mine, Ours: Leadership Through Collaboration on September 20-21 in Washington, DC. The OCLC Research and RLG Partnership planning committee organized the meeting, which was an outgrowth of previous OCLC work focusing on the convergence of libraries, archives and museums.

October 8, 2010 — The Best Practices Exchange, an annual gathering of state archivists, librarians and others with an interest in the preservation of government digital information, held its fifth annual meeting September 28-October 1 in Phoenix, Az. A special focus of the meeting was upon the four Library of Congress state government information projects supported under the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.