Bits'N'Picas is incredible! It made it possible for me to salvage and keep on using old bitmap fonts even when my desktop removed support for using bitmap fonts natively. It's the only tool I have found which makes it actually easy to convert a bitmap font into a TrueType font. Even better, Bits'N'Picas supports many input formats.

https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas

#fonts #DigitalArchiving #retrocomputing

"Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global Capital.

Researchers, historians, and citizens around the world rely on the web archives of local news sites to do their work.

“Blocking the Internet Archive’s web crawlers threatens one of the most effective ways that we capture and store news content for the long term,” Edward McCain, a journalism librarian at the University of Missouri, said. “In the present we may have some workarounds, but in the long run, it weakens a vital link in primary source materials that we need to understand where we’ve been and where we want to go.”

Working journalists are among the most frequent users of the Wayback Machine’s local news archives. Over the last month, online petitions have called for news media companies to allow the Internet Archive to preserve their journalism."

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/more-than-340-local-news-outlets-are-limiting-the-internet-archives-access-to-their-journalism/

#InternetArchiving #DigitalArchiving #News #Journalism #Media #DigitalPreservation

Maintenance begins at creation, so why are we not creating better?

The beats are the same. You work for government, or academia (lets face it, that’s probably where 90% of the work is) you have a deliverable; you save it; you print to PDF; you store it on an institutional repository with some metadata (or Zenodo, OSF or equivalent) and its done.

There’s a small chance that it’s FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) right? It has metadata that can be discovered by an audience looking for it and can be indexed by search engines. The data is potentially accessible if published correctly. They’re not particularly interoperable or easily converted, and PDFs aren’t really designed for reuse, even if tools like Apache Tika help ease the burden of extracting artifacts. It’s just a PDF, why are we even talking about FAIR? There begins a story…

The beats are the same, yet, we work in digital preservation, our backgrounds are in GLAM or software, why do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot? Why are we not using our skills to create better?

What if your favorite library could instantly find *any* book, even the obscure ones? 🤯 Librarians are harnessing AI for mind-blowing digital archiving and cataloging! ✨ This isn't just about organizing; it's about unlocking access to knowledge like never before. Dive into the future of information retrieval! 🚀

#AI #TechNews #BuildInPublic #DigitalArchiving #LibraryTech #KnowledgeManagement
https://techaitoolbox.com/librarians-ai-archiving/

Recovoly – Built for Better Document Recovery
Recovoly는 AI 기반 문서 복원 플랫폼으로, 손상되거나 퇴색된 문서, 찢어진 부분, 잉크 번짐 등을 정밀하게 복원한다. 이 플랫폼은 수백만 건의 역사적 문서 데이터를 학습한 독자적 AI 모델을 활용해 텍스처 재생성, 잉크 색상 복원, 손상된 부분 재구성 등을 지원하며, 배치 처리와 API 제공으로 대규모 문서 복원도 가능하다. 주로 박물관, 도서관, 기업 등에서 활용되며, 문서의 가독성과 보존 가치를 크게 향상시킨다.

https://www.recovoly.com/

#documentrestoration #aiinpainting #historicaldocuments #imageprocessing #digitalarchiving

Digital dark times: Salaries in digital preservation

The Serpentine is one of the world’s most renowned art galleries. Their exhibitions as varied as Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst, and Marina Abramović. They don’t hold a permanent collection, instead, they provide a space for temporary collections and an annual pavilion, the pavilion designed by luminaries such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Ai Weiwei.

Given a recent job posting it looks like they are looking at maintaining their memory better and branching out into digital preservation.

Here’s the kicker — its salary band is GBP 35,000 to GBP 38,000. So it must be an entry level position, especially in London, right?

Well, let’s see what they want you to do for that price tag…

Densho: Building the Densho Digital Repository: Three Decades of Digital Preservation. “How did Densho’s digital archives begin, and how have they evolved over nearly three decades? Densho Archives Director Caitlin Oiye Coon traces the journey from the creation of Densho’s first ‘Digital Archive’ in 1998 to today’s ‘Densho Digital Repository,’ highlighting the people, technologies, and […]

How much does a screenshot of some text weigh?

5kiB? 50kB?

But not this one.

I wanted to store an article for future reference and it was a crazy 500kiB!
And there's nothing in it!

What's the answer to this riddle? Follow this thread to find out.

#compression #graphics #archiving #digitalarchiving