Keeping Up with the
Bits: Preserving your digital records
Mark Myers, Texas State Library and Archives Commission
- Biggest risks to digital records are unintentional deletion, corruption, and obsolescence
- Manage your electronic records with these steps:
- Identify – know what you have
- Decide – what are you going to keep; prioritize for preservation
- Organize – create a central location, clearly label it
- Back-up – LOCKSS (lots of copies keep stuff safe)
- Describe your records in the metadata
- Digital media files come in 3 types
- Uncompressed – raw files in actual size, ex. .wav, .tiff
- Loseless – compressed but without loss of quality, ex. .wma, .png
- Lossy – compressed but with loss of quality, ex. mp3 and jpg
- Learn more at Library of Congress digital preservation website
Family Tree DNA –
Understanding DNA for Genealogy
James Brewster, Family Tree DNA
- Three types of DNA tests
- Y-DNA – for males only; traces father’s father’s father for 25 generations
- mt-DNA – traces direct maternal line for 52 or more generations; shows your Haplogroup
- Autosomal – for last 5 to 6 generations; you may not have many surnames in common with your matches
- Chromosome Browser is a tool with Family Tree DNA that gets more useful the more relatives you have tested
- Remember – just because your parents have something, it doesn’t mean it’s going to get passed down to you
- You can transfer DNA results between companies
- You can join a project or group, such as surname, haplogroup, geographical, lineage
- Learn more at www.familytreedna.com/learn/, https://dna-explained.com/, https://isogg.org/ , or https://www.yourdnaguide.com/
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