Q: What do 100 year old knitting patterns and a lost Robert Louis-Stevenson story have in common?

A: A digitally preserved newspaper page.

Q: What about if you add:

The news about 100,000 books on Freebase got me poking around with curl. I was pleased to see that Freebase actually distinguishes between a book as a work, and a particular edition of that book. To FRBR aficionados this will be familiar as the difference between a Work and a Manifestation:

For example here is a URI for James Joyce’s Dubliners as a work:

http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.dubliners

and here is a URI for a 1991 edition of Dubliners:

http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/guid.9202a8c04000641f80000000048ea5b4

If you follow those links in your browser you’ll most likely be redirected to the human readable html view. But machine agents can use the same URL to discover say an RDF representation of this edition of Dubliners, for example with curl:

Some folks at LC and CDL are trying to kick-start a new public discussion list for talking about digital curation in its many guises: repositories, tools, standards, techniques, practices, etc. The intuition being that there is a social component to the problems of digital preservation and repository interoperability.

Of course NDIIPP (the arena for the CDL/LC collaboration) has always been about building and strengthening a network of partners. But as Priscilla Caplan points out in her survey of the digital preservation landscape Ten Years After, organizations in Europe like the JISC and NESTOR seem to have understood that there is an educational component to digital preservation as well. Yet even the JISC and NESTOR have tended to focus more on the preservation of scholarly output, whereas digital preservation really extends beyond that realm of materials.