More from TX Hisp Gen & Hist Conference...

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
• www.digitalpreservation.org/personalarchiving/

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/

JO

Digital Archiving

Here are a few tidbits I gleaned from the webinar “Be Your Own Digital Archivist: Preserve Your Research” as presented by Cyndi Ingle at the SCGS Jamboree 2016.  My favorites are below, and I’ve put the handout in the V: drive, Clayton Library Files, In-service Training.

• Organize the folders on your computer in a simple logical way, and use the same system in your email and on your cloud or backup storage.
• Use a good file naming convention such as “1940 US Census Long Beach, CA, Florence MONROE, Ancestry.jpg” which shows what the document is, who it relates to, and where you found it.  You can also add information to the properties for each file.
• When scanning photos, scan as a TIFF in the highest resolution possible (600 dpi), and save this as a Master File.  If you want to enhance or share a scanned photo, make a copy as a JPG and make alterations to the JPG.
•  One way to capture the photo information on the photo is to add a small white border to the photo (by adding canvas size) and put a text box into the white space.
• Denise Levenick has a blog called TheFamilyCurator.com related to preserving and sharing family memories.  She has also written a couple of books. 
•  According to Cyndi, Amazon Prime is now offering Cloud service as part of their package, which may be of interest to folks.
   

 
Patti

Northeast Document Conservation Center

Every now and then we get a phone call or a patron asking about how to preserve photos or newspapers. The Northeast Document Conservation Center has a lot of information on their website. Some of the information is geared toward institutions and some toward the individual.

Ashley

Book Restoration for the Public

We now have a local vendor in Pearland who does individual book restoration and repair for the public. Marie Brannon has a studio set up in her home. The link below provides a photo montage of some of her work. Many of the photos follow the repair from start to finish. Patrons will need to contact her
for further information, such as price, and time taken to repair.

A poster has been put on our bulletin board in the snack room that has her name, address, phone number as well as the link to her Flickr site below.

skp

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29495653@N04/sets/72157624683712111/

Vinegar Syndrome Microfilm

As many of you know several rolls of microfilm have been removed from upstairs because of deterioration. All of the rolls that have been removed are marked in the microprint database and finding aids. The rolls that can be duplicated have been sent off to the company for duplication and we do not have a current time frame on when they will be ready. The rolls that could not be duplicated because of the damage being too extensive have been properly disposed of and we are looking into replacing them as funding allows.

Ashley