Blogs: Preservation Actions

Many factors contribute to the long-term preservation of and access to digital collections. And typically, the endpoint for this material is a repository—or other type of preservation system. But what happens to content after it is stored? How do digital preservationists ensure that content is correct and valid when ingested as well as remains unchanged […]

Overview This webinar looked at the techniques the National Archives New Zealand is developing to aid in the analysis of collections and also support the dissemination of the skill set that will help non-digital-preservation specialists continue to support the organisation in its ability to process born-digital collections. In 2013, the Archives New Zealand’s worked on analysing the content […]

We’ve been doing legacy disk extracts at Archives New Zealand for a number of years with much of the effort enabling us to do this work being done by colleague Mick Crouch, and former Archives New Zealand colleague Euan Cochrane – earlier this year, we received some disks from New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DoC) which we successfully imaged and […]

We recently posted an article on the UK Web Archive blog that may be of interest here, User-Driven Digital Preservation, where we summarise our work with the SCAPE Project on a little prototype application that explores how we might integrate user feedback and preservation actions into our usual discovery and access processes. The idea is […]

It is well-known that PDF documents can contain features that are preservation risks (e.g. see here and here). Migration of existing PDFs to PDF/A is sometimes advocated as a strategy for mitigating these risks. However, the benefits of this approach are often questionable, and the migration process can also be quite risky in itself. As […]

This blog post continues a series of posts about the weeb archiving topic „ARC to WARC migration“, namely it is a follow-up on the posts „ARC to WARC migration: How to deal with de-duplicated records?“, and „Some reflections on scalable ARC to WARC migration“. Especially the last one of these posts ,which described how SCAPE […]

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 […]

I have been working on some code to ensure the accurate and consistent output of any file format analysis based on the DROID CSV export, example here. One way of looking at it is an executive summary of a DROID analysis, except I don't think executives, as such, will be its primary user-base.  The reason for pushing […]

Well over a year ago I wrote the ”A Year of FITS”(http://www.openpreservation.org/blogs/2013-01-09-year-fits) blog post describing how we, during the course of 15 months, characterised 400 million of harvested web documents using the File Information Tool Kit (FITS) from Harvard University. I presented the technique and the technical metadata and basically concluded that FITS didn’t fit […]

This post covers two main topics that are related; characterising web content with Nanite, and my methods for successfully integrating the Tika parsers with Nanite. Introducing Nanite Nanite is a Java project lead by Andy Jackson from the UK Web Archive, formed of two main subprojects: Nanite-Core: an API for Droid    Nanite-Hadoop: a MapReduce […]