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.
In this blog post I will give a brief update of the latest jpylyzer developments. Jpylyzer is a validation and feature extraction tool for the JP2 (JPEG 2000 Part 1) still image format.
The agenda can be seen at: http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/KB/Agenda+-+OPF+Hackathon+-+A+Practical+Approach+to+Preservation+Systems
Registration opening soon...
Archives New Zealand and the University of Freiburg are cooperating on a data recovery project. The archive received a set of 5.25 inch floppy disks from the early 1990s that contained records of a public organization dating back to the mid 1980s. These floppies were not readable in standard X86 machines with a 5,25 inch floppy drive attached to it.
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.
The typical reading room computer in libraries, archives and often museums is equipped with a way for patrons to search and browse the institutions catalogues and digital collections. The digital collections are often rather restricted by the systems to making accessible only a few of today's multimedia formats and documents types (for example PDF, jpeg and a few audio or video formats).
The large and growing volume of data held in an increasing variety of relational databases presents a huge challenge to the archiving community. This hackathon is designed to bridge the gap between digital preservation practitioners and developers. It will provide a forum for practical problem solving and help practitioners to articulate their requirements clearly to developers; and will help developers respond more precisely to the needs of practitioners.
Follow the event on Twitter
#dbpres
Who should attend?
This tool needs some explanation of how it came about. At Nationaal Archief we were faced with various bottlenecks at ingest for our digital repository (which we call e-Depot). Characterization was one of them and when the OPF released the first prototype of FIDO we happily jumped on board for its development. Seeing the potential for significant speed increases, Nationaal Archief put in a substantial amount of work - freeing me for development of FIDO, leading to a wrapped Java version.
Digital objects are often more complex than their common perception as individual files or small sets of files. Standard digital preservation methods can lose important parts, or the context of digital objects. Interestingly enough thousands of miles apart Maurice van den Dobbelsteen (The Netherlands) and Euan Cochrane (New Zealand) simultaneously proposed a new approach to cope with the special requirements of their National Archives in dealing with the different types of complex objects.
I attended the Practical Tools for Digital Preservation - A Hackathon event as a developer. As well as being enjoyable, I found this event useful and interesting.
