This (fiscal) year, I’m taking some next steps using the data produced by my digital media survey at MIT. Now that we have a record of what media exist in the collections to the best of our knowledge, we can begin transferring the data off of them at a larger scale and into preservation and access storage. But wait… could I use this work as a representative sample to better plan for the future? Enter the Transfer Metrics Needed Tracking (TMNT) project.

Over the last year, I’ve worked on a digital media survey of our archival and distinctive collections at MIT Libraries. I mentioned in that post linked above I would update this blog along the way but that didn’t really happen, sorry friends!

Media circus

Things went pretty well and a bit faster than I expected. It took me just over a year with some fits and starts to finish the whole survey process. The first stage was our archival and manuscript collections, of which, I was able to review over 300 boxes and a few dozen rare books and publications in 8 months.

At work I’ve been crawling some form of the MIT COVID-19 response webpage daily since early March 2020. In that time there have been a couple of domain name switches but it’s been pretty boring considering the scope and tragedy of the ongoing pandemic.

In June, I was reviewing some of our crawl reports for this seed and I noticed an unusual url in the host report: archive.org, i.e. the big brother of Archive-It, THE (with no respect to Ohio State) Internet Archive. Obviously, this shouldn’t happen unless the site was actually linking out to IA.

In Ricky Erway’s foundational instructional guide, “You’ve Got to Walk Before You Can Run: First Steps for Managing Born-Digital Content Received on Physical Media”, we learn that “walk” in this context means to know about the physical media that you have in your collection, the where, the how much, and the what type. This is also related to the archival principles of physical and intellectual control of collections. This report inspired many archival institutions to begin surveying their collections for born-digital media as a basic starting point to approaching born-digital processing. The trend included multiple rounds of SAA’s “Jump-in” initiative which encouraged repositories to do surveys and share their results.

A little while ago I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and ended up at the the Wikipedia article for the .us domain. I was particularly intrigued by the section for Kids.us. Have you heard of it? I know I had no idea what it was.

As the Wikipedia article states, it was a subdomain of the .us domain made specifically for kids and created by U.S. law! Through an act of Congress in 2002, lawmakers created the subdomain to be used by content providers to create kid-centric websites. It never really took off and by the end there were only 6 active websites left on the subdomain: Nick, NickJr, PBSkids, Smithsonian, and two identical sites selling trampolines.^{1 2}

Hi there! I’ve decided to break ground on a new website for myself that’s more under my control and at my own domain.

I’m moving away from my old site josephcarrano.wordpress.com and casting it into the abandoned graveyard. In recent years, I’ve been loath to create new posts not only because I’m lazy but also because I hate the thought of publishing content to URLs that could easily break.

Despite this worry, I won’t be migrating content at the moment or setting up redirects because I don’t feel like paying WordPress for the redirect service and it’s simple enough to leave it there neglected as it has been for the last few years. I’m mainly leaving it up in the interest of preventing link rot on the few posts that people found useful. If you want to check out the posts there, they should remain as long as wordpress.com remains free and functioning online. Maybe I’ll reconsider this later.