Euan Cochrane's Blog

This is a relatively long post, so to summarise before delving into the details: We’re exploring Wikidata, the (relatively new) Wikipedia for data, as a knowledge base for digital preservation information and would appreciate feedback and involvement. At Yale University Library we are beginning a new programme of work (with funding from both CLIR and […]

I read Johan's fascinating post this morning about the obsolescence of Quattro Pro formats. In the post he included a set of Quattro Pro spreadsheets and invited others to try to access them using the original software or an old version of Excel. Luckily I have an old version of Quattro Pro available so I thought I'd […]

The problem We have a large volume of content on floppy disks that we know are degrading but which we don't know the value of. Considerations We don't want to waste time/resources on low-value content. We don't know the value of the content. We want to be able to back up the content on the […]

Coming up in the next month are two excellent OPF hackathons: the “Emulation, learn from the experts” hackathon and the “CURATEcamp 24 hour worldwide file id hackathon“. One follows the other with the emulation hackathon running from the 13th of November till the 15th and the File ID hackathon on Friday the 16th.  This seems […]

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 […]

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 the information that is presented to users when […]

Niklas is finishing up his time here at Archives New Zealand and we are pleased to be able to announce the first publication of code to come out of his work to identify office files with linked dependencies.  “The Dependency Discovery Tool searches through binary office files (.doc, .xls and .ppt) and tries to find […]

 Many office suites and other applications allow the embedding of information in them via a link to another file. The use of linked spreadsheets is common amonst data intensive agencies and large documents are often managed through linking multiple office documents to form a single final product.  Currently we have only anecdotal evidence as to […]

Emulation requires disk images to be provided and used for the main hard drive of emulated computers. These disk images can be captured from old hard drives as discussed here. In order to automate aspects of running these disk images in an emulator a tool is needed that tells us which emulators would be compatible with […]

Research Activities and Open Questions at Archives New Zealand At Archives New Zealand we are currently working on a number of digital preservation research activities including: The collation of a sample set of files for use in testing tools and approaches and other digital preservation experiments.  Documenting software applications and environments. Developing an evidence base of […]