Blogs: Format Registry

On 13 June 2017, the OPF held a webinar called ‘PRONOM in Practice’: https://old.openpreservation.org/event/pronom-in-practice/ (login required). The presenters (David Clipsham, Jenny Mitcham, and Justin Simpson) gave an introduction to PRONOM, an online file format registry maintained by The National Archives in the UK, and described how to create new PRONOM signatures and submit them to the Registry. Following on from […]

This blog diary captures what the OPF team have been upto. We aim to post updates at least once a fortnight, more regularly when there’s a lot going on. Becky: It’s been a busy month, starting off with our Annual General Meeting on 7-8 June. This year it was kindly hosted by the Bibliothèque nationale […]

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 […]

Inspired by Jenny Micham’s blog post about developing her first file format signature, I thought it would be fun to take a crack at creating one myself. I previously dipped my toe into the world of contributing to PRONOM by looking at a few mis-identifications and multi-identifications, but I had yet to create a file […]

The latest version of siegfried, 1.5.0, has just been released. The big change is support for a second identifier type, freedesktop.org’s Shared MIME-Info specification.

At my workplace, we write a lot of small scripts to encode preservation workflows. These scripts pipeline simple actions like munging metadata, moving files about, and calling other tools such as Tika and ImageMagick. Often these actions are conditional on the format of the file being processed: for example, we only want to run Tika over the formats for […]

Abstract() This blog discusses what we have available in our toolkit for contributing more signatures to PRONOM for the benefit of the digital preservation community. It also discusses the potential issues we need to work around in the short time we have between controlled PRONOM releases. The blog outlines an idea for a temporary, federated […]

While browsing ArchiveTeam's File Formats Wiki earlier this week, I came across some entries I created there on Quattro Pro spreadsheets two years ago. At the time I had also contributed some old Quattro Pro for DOS spreadsheets (here and here) from my personal archives to the OPF format corpus. Seeing those files again, I […]

Earlier this week I had a discussion with some colleagues about the archiving of mobile phone and tablet apps (iPhone/Android), and, equally important, ways to provide long-term access. The immediate incentive for this was an announcement by a Dutch publisher, who recently published a children's book that is accompanied by its own app. Also, there […]

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 […]