How to talk people into handing over their digital archives, and why it's important.

D-Lib Magazine

D-Lib Magazine

The majority of information about science, culture, society, economy and the environment is born digital, yet the underlying technology is subject to rapid obsolescence. One solution to this obsolescence, format migration, is widely practiced and supported by many software packages, yet migration has well known risks. For example, newer formats – even where similar in function – do not generally support all of the features of their predecessors, and, where similar features exist, there  may be significant differences of interpretation.There appears to be a conflict between the wide use of migration and its known risks. In this paper  we explore a simple hypothesis – that, where migration paths exist, the majority of data files can be safely migrated leaving only a few that must be handled more carefully – in the context of several scientific data formats that are or were widely used. Our approach is to gather information about  potential migration mismatches and, using custom tools, evaluate a large collection of data files for the incidence of these risks. Our results support our  initial hypothesis, though with some caveats.  Further, we found that writing a tool to identify “risky” format features is considerably easier than  writing a migration tool.

Whence authenticity/integrity/fixity, given XML-validation infrastructure?

Something that lasts, really lasts, would be nice...

Today's announcement from Amazon of Glacier  vindicates the point I made here , that the pricing model of cloud storage services such as S3 ...

Elementary for an info pro; might be useful in convincing a historian.

Using FITS to gauge file fitness for preservation.

An action plan is an xml document which specifies how the format will be treated in the short-term and in the longer-term, and when the plan will be reviewed. These treatments might include "forward migration" - converting the format to a newer version of the same format, e.g. PDF 1.2 to PDF 2.0. Or they might include "normalization" - converting the format to a different format that may be easier to preserve, e.g. PDF 1.4 to PDF/A. In all cases, the file in its original format and version, will be archived in addition to any migrated or normalized file formats.

Server sandbox etc. for digital preservation work.

ELUXE（イラックス）スパークリングオーガニックスパシャンプーという炭酸シャンプーの評判が気になって購入してみました。実際使った私の効果をレビューします。また、気になる販売店情報や通販最安値情報（amazon、楽天、公式）や効果、成分や解約方法なども紹介してます。

Server crashes and takes every article with it (so could your world be wiped out too?)

Count on Pixar to make a small animated short about how they almost lost Toy Story 2 while it was in production. Watch the video to see how three characters punched into a computer — only thre…

Xena is a digital preservation tool that first identifies a digital object’s file format, and for certain formats then converts the object into an open format. Xena also creates a base64-encoded version of the file, (using only printable ASCII characters) with an XML metadata wrapper.

The planning tool Plato is a decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning process and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison in a service-oriented architecture to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours.

Linklist of data-curation-related tools and services.