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!

JISC Moving Images and Sound Archiving Study

I recently gave a lecture about digitization for FIS2308H at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto.  In the process of preparing my slides I came across a JISC study that I found to be incredibly helpful.  It provided an excellent overview of preservation recommendations for audio and moving images, and described in detail the many different file formats that could be used to store this data.  In addition, it tackled the big question of archiving these types of materials, and even provided a sample recommended minimum metadata set.

ELPUB 2008

I am really inspired by some of the sessions I attended at ELPUB 2008 in Toronto June 25-27.

Publishers at York University will soon be introduced to the WebCite service.  It is a self-archiving service for web URLs, allowing users to request that a web page be archived. A successful request results in a permanent link that can be used to cite that snapshot of the web location at that particular time in perpetuity, allowing authors to use web URLs in their bibliographies with confidence.

Gunther Eysenbach`s paper discussing the WebCite service can be found here.

I am also looking forward to indexing some of York University`s encoded archival desciption files with California Digital Library`s eXtensible Text Framework. I attended the pre-conference workshop and am now happily playing with XTF on my laptop.

Portico and Ithaka Digital Preservation Survey

I just finished reading the Portico and Ithaka Digital Preservation Survey. It appears that while respondents are view the loss of journal content to be unacceptable, about 66% are not yet taking action.

While studies of this sort are necessary, I found the Portico branding on every page a little too pushy, and I’m uncertain if its smart to put faith entirely into any one approach.

Interesting notes:

“Perceiving the landscape as complicated was one of the variables most strongly associated with not participating in an e-journal initiative.”

“Research libraries should be taking care of e-journal preservation on behalf of the entire library community.”