Blogs: Bit rot

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 […]

Anyone willing to preserve digital content must be aware of events that might constitute a relevant risk. In SCAPE we are developing tools that will allow you to detect risks before they cause any irreversible damage. Help us understand the preservation events, threats and opportunities, you find more relevant and the ways you would like […]

Following the community response to our workshop last year, we want to invite you again to contribute your future preservation challenge! Digital Preservation has emerged as a key challenge for information systems in almost any domain from eCommerce and eGovernment to finance, health, and personal life. The field is increasingly recognized and has taken major […]

Following a few interesting conversations recently, I got interested in the idea of 'bit flip' – an occasion where a single binary bit changes state from a 0 to a 1 or from a 1 to a 0 inside a file. I wrote a very inefficient script that sequentially flipped every bit in jpeg file, […]

With the final presentation of the student discussing his CTOS filesystem recovery study in Freiburg it is time to draw a conclusion and summarize the lessons-learnt. The original problem was a set of CTOS floppies (this fact was to be discovered first, see a previous post on this topic). It represents a microcosm of the […]

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. Scientists at […]

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. History of jpylyzer Around mid-summer 2011, the KB started initial preparations for migrating 146 TB of TIFF images from the Dutch Metamorfoze […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]