Most archivists, librarians, and digital preservation folks love metadata — and we at the Archives are no exception.  Metadata is the sort of invisible information stored within or alongside a digital copy of something like a cool, older video about a NASA space flight.  Metadata allows us to keep track of things in a detailed way.  It [...]

January is traditionally a time of new beginnings. With the turning of the calendar page to a new year comes an opportunity to start fresh with a clean slate.  In Digitization Services (IDS), we have some ideas for where to focus our renewed energy – moving our quality efforts from a project into a program. [...]

In Digitization Services, we’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about quality. What does it mean? How do we measure it? And why should we care about it? After the establishment of the Products and Services (P&S) web portal resource in 2010 (see the http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access/?p=5320 blog post), Digitization Services knew we still had more [...]

The Digitization Services or IDS (formerly known as the Special Media Preservation Division) is NARA’s primary source of in-house digitization and analog reformatting of motion picture film, audio, video, photographs, aerial film, textual documents, cartographic documents, microfilm, and microfiche. 2010 was a year of introspection and change for us. Inspired in part by the Open [...]