Is DOOM doomed? Should we say our last words for Word? Will Mozilla be a dinosaur?
These questions echoed through the Montpelier room of the Library of Congress earlier this week during Preserving.exe, a conference from 20-21 May on the challenges of keeping software alive for the long term. The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) invited Still Water’s John Bell and Jon Ippolito to represent the University of Maine’s Digital Curation program in this gathering, which also included conservators, scholars, librarians, astrophysicists, and industry reps from Microsoft to Mozilla.
It’s hard to find a collecting institution that doesn’t have a Web site these days, and you’re going to need to know MySQL and PHP to run most of them. But training as an archivist or librarian doesn’t teach you how to customize a Web site. What’s a digital curator to do?
Maine Public Radio highlights the debate over open access to scholarly publications in conversation with Still Water’s Jon Ippolito and his fellow colleagues from the University of Maine.
A contagious media project by John Bell remixing famous book covers has taken flight, visualizing the literary possibilities attending the recent merger of Random House and Penguin Books.
Whether they manage bits for their local historical society or the Library of Congress, the digital era has placed added demands on today’s curators. The growing need for training in these new skills is one of the motivations for the University of Maine’s just-launched 
The Digital Curation program is a two-year graduate certificate, taught online, intended for professionals working in museums, archives, artist studios, government offices, and anywhere that people need to manage digital files. The program walks students through the phases of managing digitized or born-digital artifacts, including acquisition, representation, access, and preservation. Registration opens soon!
Screengrab of Debra Levine’s DEMONSTRATING ACT UP 
Which is the oldest human record?
The University of Maine is poised to launch an innovative graduate program in digital curation, beginning September 2012. The online, 18-credit curriculum aims to train anyone who works with digitized or born-digital items to make them accessible and meaningful to present and future generations.
The Pool is one of the software packages showcased in Trebor Scholz’s 2011 anthology Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy, along with Facebook, Tumblr, and Second Life. Available as a printed or eBook, the text surveys “how both ready-at-hand proprietary platforms and open-source tools can be used to create situations in which all learners actively engage each other and the teacher to become more proficient, think in more complex ways, gain better judgment, become more principled and curious, and lead distinctive and productive lives.”
