It's been nearly four and a half years since the joint announcement between EMC and the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
There has been a flurry of activity at the Library recently.
I attended a celebration of the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's election victory. The evening was a simulation and re-creation of the events from 1960, complete with Walter Cronkite broadcasts and predictions from IBM computers that Richard Nixon would win.
The Library also announced that on January 13, 2011, a redesigned website will be unveiled (thanks to Gil Press for pointing out the Boston Globe article). The website (www.jfklibrary.org) will in part be the result of the multi-year digital archiving project that I've written about over the past few years.
Many of the original articles I wrote are slightly out-of-date because of a technology refresh. The refresh falls into these categories:
- The CX300 has been replaced with an NS-120.
- The NS-120 will hold another five years worth of digital artifacts, and it also satisfies the video/audio streaming capabilities required to access certain content.
- The Library upgraded their Documentum configuration to Digital Asset Manager. This platform will allow for the addition of historical metadata to each artifact. This metadata allows JFK Archivists to add historical relevance and interpretation to the collection.
- A second Centera has been installed at a disaster recovery site at Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania (the previous configuration used Networker to back up to tape).
The disaster recovery strategy is a reflection of the enormous amount of preservation that has been going on inside the museum over the last few years. For example, this quote was taken from the announcement of the January 13 website launch:
This unprecedented initiative, which has begun with the challenge of scanning, digitizing, and describing more than 250,000 documents, 35,000 photos, 250 audio reels and 72 reels of film footage has been underway for more than four years by the staff of the Kennedy Library’s Archives.
All of this footage will be online and available for JFK scholars and researchers around the world.
In addition to the digital archiving website, a separate website will be launched a week later: www.JFK50.org. This teaser on the JFK50 website gives a great look at the type of footage and history that will be available via the digital archive.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
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