Bit rot

Quality Assurance for Digital Book Collections

Automated identification of corresponding images and duplicate removal is a challenging task due to inconsistent quality of digitized book collections. Validating such collections based on qualitative criteria is a challenging endeavor according to the sheer amount of data that has to be processed. Traditional approaches seem to have peaked at a certain level.

Update: Digital Archaeology and Forensics

Beginning of this year we reported on first results of a joint Archives New Zealand and University of Freiburg data recovery project of a set of 5.25 inch floppy disks from the early 1990s. After recovering the raw bitstreams from the floppy disks with a special hardware device the resulting image files were sent over to Freiburg for further analysis.

A prototype JP2 validator and properties extractor

A few months ago I wrote a blog post on a simple JP2 file structure checker. This led to some interesting online discussions on JP2 validation. Some people asked me about the feasibility of expanding the tool to a full-fledged JP2 validator. Despite some initial reservations, I eventually decided to dedicate a couple of weeks to writing a rough prototype.

Future Perfect 2012

The draft programme for Future Perfect 2012 is now available online!

http://bit.ly/uVsvDl

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:

Date: 
26 March 2012 to 27 March 2012
Location: 
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Wellington
New Zealand
Event Types: 

Bit Rot & Long Term Access

Over the last weeks at several events Paul Wheatley of the British Library showed examples of bit rot in an image collection of the BL.

Planets did lots of R&D into preservation and long term access and provided background and breakthrough thinking on many of the technical challenges.

But Paul's tenacity on this subject bit rot triggered me to open a Problem, Requirement, Use Case sequence in the "what we need" section of the OPF wiki.