The next OPF Hackathon - A Practical Approach to Preservation Systems - will focus on preservation workflows and systems. It will consider a large number of widely available tools that are being used both by the community and in industry.
We have recently started some research at Archives New Zealand to investigate the best approaches for appraising, transferring (where relevant) and preserving databases.
As part of this research we will be undertaking case studies of a number of databases. The case studies will involve a number of aspects including where possible testing one or more preservation approaches on each database. We hope to publish the results of this research at the end of the project.
Many institutions have been doing large scale digitisation projects during the last decade, and the question how to store the digital master images in a cost effective way made the JPEG2000 image format more popular in the library, museums, and archives community. Especially the lossy JP2 encoding of page image masters turned out to provide a good balance between reducing the file size and preserving the visible properties of a master image.
Maintaining the ability of an organisation or user to be able to “open” or “render” a file or set of files is one of the core digital preservation challenges. The Rendering Matters Report outlines the results of research conducted at Archives New Zealand investigating whether changes are introduced to th
The draft programme for Future Perfect 2012 is now available online!
The theme of Future Perfect 2012 - Digital Preservation by Design - seeks to stimulate discussion about how, when and why influencing the design of systems can support digital preservation and ultimately ensure that today’s information is available tomorrow. Future Perfect 2012 will be a two day conference featuring many exciting international speakers.
Our audience will hear presentations from:
The OPF is a consortium member of the SCAPE (Scalable Preservation Environments) project, co-funded by the EU. http://www.scape-project.eu/.
A command-line tool for invocation of UfcMigrate has been created as a result of requests at the Hackaton in Cologne. The binaries and sources can be obtained here: https://github.com/iv10/UfcClient. The repository also contains sample digital objects in the "samples" directory. The testing can be performed on our UfcMigrate service running at http://bwfla.ruf.uni-freiburg.de host.
There is a very first test available for a emulation based Word Perfect 6 to RTF file migration. A PLANETS web service running in Freiburg could be invoked by OPF partners running a PLANETS instance by adding an external resource.
Over the last few weeks I've been working on the design of a workflow that the KB is planning to use for the migration of a collection of (mostly old) TIFF images to JP2. One major risk of such a migration is that hardware failures during the migration process may result in corrupted images. For instance, one could imagine a brief network or power interruption that occurs while an image is being written to disk. In that case data may be missing from the written file.
The GRATE-R, originally developed for PLANETS, utilises the idea of performing
migration by interactive session replaying in emulated original environments.
According to this approach the format migration process is carried out by
computer interaction with the graphical user interface of the original,
format-native applications. Their capability of exporting the loaded digital
objects in a format other than their initial format is used. The order and