"It's really easy to understand the lure of small, artisanal projects that we can polish to a satin finish: they offer a sense of craftsmanship, a human scale for our work, and the chance to get something really *right*. But larger projects and bigger systems can often feel soulless and unsatisfying, even when we're excited by the causes and ideas behind them. So is there a way to work on an ambitious scale without losing the purpose and handcraftedness that makes more intimate gigs so much fun? (Hint: yes.)

Via the craft of content strategy and its intertwinglements with design and code, this talk follows the connections between making small-scale, handcrafted artifacts and designing big, juicy systems (editorial and otherwise) that encourage both liveliness and excellence."

We’ve all had those tough conversations on how best to exchange dates between two systems: “is DD-MM-YYYY good for everyone?” “what about YYYY/MM/DD” “we could just use Epoch timestamps”…

This document defines a date and time format for use in Internet
protocols that is a profile of the ISO 8601 standard for
representation of dates and times using the Gregorian calendar.

"To manufacture a one inch gobstopper takes two weeks!

It probably takes seven minutes to eat one. Every minute you suck that's two days. An hour a second!"

But old source code isn't the only cultural artifact that requires specialized knowledge to preserve. As paper and dyes deteriorate, acetate degenerates, and the minute magnetic flux recorded in analog tape fades with the ages, how do we preserve cultural artifacts like photographs, music, and film? And what of more modern digitally created media? Images and video are shot directly in digital formats and stored on flash media. Music is recorded in 24-bit, 192kHz digital resolution onto massive hard drives. All these files exist in various codecs, formats, and file systems; on spinning magnetic platters or in solid state NAND flash. How do we preserve these files for future reference, study, and appreciation?

Anthony Bannon, a director at the George Eastman House, wrote in the forward to 500 Cameras that "collections manage time." Collecting, documenting, and managing a collection of objects—in Bannon's case, cameras, photographs, and other photographic ephemera—gives us insight into our history, and can lead us in new directions. Such collections bring value when they are organized, interpreted, and shared.

"But we must care for them, say their names, and notice what they consign," Bannon writes. "So we take responsibility for our collections with gratitude. The collector, whether individual or institutional, engages with the object to recognize the light of its value and hold the spark, to take on the responsibility of its meaning and make sense of it."

"One of the biggest challenges in the field of digital librarianship is simply trying to evolve as fast as technology," Pike said, "because we need to also keep up with emerging file formats and software systems to read those formats. We need to think of ways to preserve them and make them accessible either through emulation, or migration to a different format or system."

"We are the custodians of what has been created, and are enabling access—ideally free and unlimited—for the future," Pike said. "No matter what is created and where it is created, if it is important, some librarian, archivist, or records manager is capturing it and saving it for the future. In addition to saving the digital objects, we need to make them accessible so people can use and reuse the materials."

All purpose strftime date string creator. Handy.

How to tell time anywhere, and most useful