PRONOM

Paving the way towards sustainability of electronic records is PRONOM, an online registry of technical information.

An initiative of the National Archives (the UK government’s official archive in Surrey) the PRONOM registry was “originally developed to support the accession and long-term preservation of electronic records”. The National Archives have graciously made this valuable resource available to all.

As described on the site, “PRONOM holds information about file formats, and the software products which can process (read, write, identify etc) each format. Information related to the file formats, such as documentation about them, their compression types, character encoding schemes and intellectual property rights is also held. “

When browsing the site, I was pleased to find that in addition to a simple search, one can search by file format, vendor, software, lifecycle, migration pathway and Pronom unique identifier. The search also allows you to find file formats by extension, and to search for software that can process files with a particular extension (or file format name).  An online submission form is available to encourage user contributions and to help keep the registry current.

What an important step towards tackling the challenges of digital preservation!

Green OA vs. Gold OA

A post by Stevan Harnad on the JISC repositories listserv directed me to Richard Poynder’s  post and article.  His article “Open Access: Whom would you back” provides an excellent history of the Open Access movement.  It chronicles the devious and fascinating approaches employed by scholarly publishers in adapting to the evolving publishing landscape.

As a librarian in the trenches promoting Green OA in support of our institutional repository, I see on a daily basis the tactics that some publishers are using to appear complicit to open access while at the same time doing their very best to undermine the authority and validity of self-archived works.  As Poynder points out, publishers are doing what they can to shift focus from Green OA to Gold OA as this is a more profitable venue for them.  He points out that we may be disappointed if all that Gold OA accomplishes is a shift from the paying of subscriptions to the paying of APCs.

While I do agree with many of Richard’s arguments, there’s one point I’d like to make. To me, it is not as important who profits most in the transition to OA, because we are all winners in the end.  While I agree that the Green OA would solve both affordability and access challenges and I back it wholeheartedly as an ideal solution,  no matter which OA models win out, as a global community we will all benefit from the barrier-free access to peer-reviewed scholarship.