The humble bloggers who toil on behalf of The Signal strive to tell stimulating stories about digital stewardship. This is unusual labor. It blends passion for a rapidly evolving subject with exacting choices about what to focus on.

Collecting, preserving and making available digital resources is driving enormous change, and the pace is so fast and the scope so broad that writing about it is like drinking from the proverbial firehose.

Back when The Signal was a mere eye gleam, institutional gatekeepers were, as is their wont, skeptical. “Can you make digital preservation interesting?” They asked. “Is there enough to write about? Will anyone care?”

While we responded with a bureaucratic version of “yes, of course!” to each question, we had to go prove it. Which, after many months and hundreds of posts, I think we have done.

I attribute success to stories that have meaning in the lives of our readers, most of whom care deeply about digital cultural heritage. As noted, that topic is as diverse as it is dynamic. A good way to gauge this is to consider the range of posts that were the most popular on the blog for the year. So here, ranked by page views based on the most current data, are our top 14 posts of 2013 (out of 257 total posts).

Special bonus: Page views are only one way to measure top-of-the-yearness. In the blogging world, comments are also important, as they indicate the degree to which readers engage with a post. By that measure, the top 14 posts of 2013 are slightly different.

Thank you to all our readers, and most especially to our commenters.