This is the start of a series on software for file identification. I’ll be exploring as broad a range as I reasonably can within the blog format, covering a variety of uses. I’m most familiar with the tools for preservation and archiving, but I’ll also look at tools for the end user and at digital forensics (in the proper sense of the word, the resolution of controversies).
REFORMA's aim is to address the challenge of implementing standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term. The project's primary objective is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into preservation repositories. The selection of suppliers follows the evaluation of designs developed from November 2014 - February 2015.
Libraries and archives at Harvard hold thousands of unique items across hundreds of digital formats, including aging technology such as CDs, floppy disks, tapes, and cassettes. To retrieve content prior to total obsolescence or decay of digital formats, librarians are using digital forensic software commonly employed by the police or the FBI to solve crimes, which enables them to identify content noninvasively and migrate it to a more stable platform.
This poster presents the Excel Archival Tool, a script that was created to programmatically convert Microsoft Excel files into open source formats suitable for long-term archival. This is accomplished by using Visual Basic Script to convert Excel workbooks (.xls and .xlsx) into comma-separated value files (.csv), while also extracting charts/figures (in .png images), cell formulas (in .txt files), and formatting/styling information (in HTML snapshots). This tool is most useful for large Excel data sets that would otherwise require large amounts of tedious work to convert manually.
The prototyping phase of the public pre-commercial procurement project PREFORMA started on April 14th 2015, with the announcement of the three winners.
The aim of PREFORMA is to develop an open-source toolset for the conformance checking of digital files intended for long-term preservation in memory institutions.
After analysing the technical and functional specifications submitted by the six groups that completed the design phase in March 2015, PREFORMA chose the three consortia awarded with contracts for the prototyping phase. This phase will last until December 2016.
Molly Schwartzburg, curator for the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library presented “Collecting in the Golden Age of the Book” Thursday, a lecture examining her efforts as a curator to document the integration of the digital age into the realm of published works.
As has been famously outlined by the Library of Congress on their website on sustainability factors for digital formats, digital material is just as susceptible to obsolescence as analog formats. Within digital preservation there are a number of strategies that can be employed in order to protect your data including refreshing, emulation or migration, to name a few. As the National Digital Stewardship Resident at Harvard Library, I am responsible for developing a format migration framework which can be continuously adapted for migration projects at Harvard.
When Kathleen O’Neill talks about digital collections, she slips effortlessly into the info-tech language that software engineers, librarians, archivists and other information technology professionals use to communicate with each other. O’Neill, a senior archives specialist in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, speaks with authority about topics such as file signatures, hex editors and checksums even though she has a traditional paper-centric Master of Library Science degree.
In the last Great Bear article we quoted sage advice from the International Association of Audiovisual Archivists: ‘Optimal preservation measures are always a compromise between many, often conflicting parameters.’ [1]
While this statement is true in general for many different multi-format collections, the issue of compromise and conflicting parameters becomes especially apparent with the preservation of digitized and born-digital video. The reasons for this are complex, and we shall outline why below.
who has worked for the last three years at the [Albert & Shirley Small] Special Collections Library [U. of Virginia Library], presented an assortment of modern publications transcending the traditional role of a book to integrate the technology and trends of modern day. Schwartzburg’s collection — largely acquired from a variety of antiquated book fairs around the nation — highlights the revival of the “artist book,” a book whose entire composition is a work in and of itself.