Blogs: Normalisation

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 […]

During my time at The National Archives UK, colleague, Adam Retter, developed a methodology for the reversible pre-conditioning of complex binary objects. The technique was required to avoid the doubling of storage for malformed JPEG2000 objects numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The difference between a malformed JPEG2000 file and a corrected, well-formed JPEG2000 file, in […]

Now that the subproject lead in PW is being transferred from me to Kresimir, it seems a good time to reflect a little on what we have achieved in PW since February 2011 and what is left to do! What did we set out to do? To accomplish effective digital preservation, environments with a preservation […]

It’s been more than two years now since I wrote my D-Lib paper JPEG 2000 for Long-term Preservation: JP2 as a Preservation Format. From time to time people ask me about the status of the issues that are mentioned in that paper, so here’s a long overdue update. Issues addressed in the 2011 paper The […]

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 […]

I am currently working on a tool that should profile collections of digital objects. The motivation behind this, is that in order to conduct efficient preservation planning, one has to analyze the content that is to be preserved and to detect the significant properties of the collection or set of objects. As soon as this […]

The JPEG 2000 compression standard is steadily becoming more and more popular in the archival community. Several large (national) libraries are now using the JP2 format (which corresponds to Part 1 of the standard) as the master format in mass digitisation projects. However, some aspects of the JP2 file format are defined in ways that […]

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 […]

I’ve finally had time to consider David Rosenthal’s response to my argument in favour of format normalisation as a preservation strategy. While I largely agree with his position on format obsolescence (with some caveats I’ll return to in a future post), we do appear to disagree on a more fundamental level – on what it […]