There are countless challenges in preserving obsolete media from breadth of formats to lack of documentation at the time of creation.  With the history of recorded sound now spanning over one hundred years wide range of technologies utilized in this span, challenges abound for any individual working to capture the range of media in need of preservation.  To accomplish this feat constant engagement is required to further understand the media, the way media is degrading, and best practices for preserving historic recordings that range from cylinders to digital multi-track recording sessions. 

For the month of September, Peter Chan - our digital archivist - is visiting the Royal Library, the National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen to share tools and processes for managing born-digital materials in collections. While hosted by the Digital Preservation Department, he will also spend time with Digital Humanities team, the Digital Forensics team and finally the Game Preservation team (based on Peter's work with born-digital workflows, ePADD-email archiving software project and the NIST-Cabrinety project at the library as well as the GAMECIP project with UCSC).

Researchers at Stanford are doing a lot of innovative and intriguing work. Their efforts are often highlighted in the Stanford Report, which provides readers with a brief compilation of the latest Stanford News via email each weekday. When those of us at Stanford Libraries who work on digital preservation read these articles, we immediately wonder what these researchers are doing to preserve all that wonderful research data.

Never ones to rest on our laurels, Stanford Libraries staff have been reaching out to these researchers and recommending that they preserve the data generated from these studies -- and sometimes submitted to journals as supplementary data files -- in the Stanford Digital Repository. We would hate to see all that innovative and intriguing work lost to the ravages of time!