It's been a tough month, such that I haven't had a chance to properly hype: I've been published!!!

The Handbook of Archival Practice is a new and really neat encyclopedic snapshot of current activities around preserving both analog and digital materials. There's a great balance of traditional and emerging concerns, and I was kindly invited to contribute the entry on "Emulation"!

Doc-minded colleagues: does anyone know of good + accessible tools or libraries for creating help-text overlays or guided actions on a web site?

Like, something that can be integrated into a front-end client that enables a "tutorial" mode with scripted actions and text you can advance through to explain the interface

@andrewjbtw nodding vigorously

Does anyone possibly have a digital copy of the paperback TOTEM (Trustworthy Online Technical Environment Metadata Database) guide? The database itself (http://www.keep-totem.co.uk/) has unfortunately turned out...not trustworthy.

Our department owns a physical copy that is trapped and inaccessible at the moment, so we can come up with some kind of one-on-one Controlled Digital Lending agreement...

https://www.amazon.com/Trustworthy-Technical-Environment-Metadata-Database/dp/3830064187

@petrichor a thing that I observed for 2+ years doing tech support for a graduate program - with students ranging from just-out-of-undergrad to mid-career Gen Xers - was that faculty wildly overestimated *everyone's* degree of digital literacy (not comfort level, different things), regardless of age

there's absolutely a shift happening, but I agree that the story is way more complicated. but I guess if you only talk to profs who teach undergrads, that's where you're going to draw conclusions

we have a large number of MS-DOS programs running in EaaSI (QEMU) that seem to install properly but crash + reboot DOS when run, and I think I need to learn about DOS memory management, and I really don't want to

Software Preservation Network will be hosting a "show and tell"-style discussion with two amazing practitioners (@VickyRampin and @elenarchivist ) next week!

Our software heritage is more than Doom, Clippy, and the Space Jam web site. Please join in for a fun discussion of some other software stories and the work SPN members do.

Details and registration here:
https://groups.google.com/g/software-preservation-network/c/TPyuyod3cY4

Last night we put on some Lifetime movie (it's been a rough couple weeks) that featured a hacker breaking into Vivica A. Fox's computer and they appeared to use htop to open a PDF, delightful

#digipres friends: is there a demo/sample corpus out there of CD-ROM disk images that demonstrates the behavior and proper imaging of the various Book/disc types?

e.g.
- mixed-mode
- multi-session
- hybrid filesystem