Blogs: Representation Information

The development work on an imaging/ripping workflow for optical media is shaping up steadily, and you can expect a write-up with more information about our software and hardware setup here in the near future (you can get a sneak peek here). However, this blog is about a very specific problem that we ran into while […]

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 […]

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 […]

This blog follows up on three earlier posts about detecting preservation risks in PDF files. In part 1 I explored to what extent the Preflight component of the Apache PDFBox library can be used to detect specific preservation risks in PDF documents. This was followed up by some work during the SPRUCE Hackathon in Leeds, […]

My previous blog Assessing file format risks: searching for Bigfoot? resulted in some interesting feedback from a number of people. There was a particularly elaborate response from Ross Spencer, and I originally wanted to reply to that directly using the comment fields. However, my reply turned out to be a bit more lengthy than I […]

Like many other organisations that are using JPEG 2000, the KB produces two representations of most of its digitised content (newspapers, books, periodicals): a high-quality, losslessly compressed JP2 that is the archival master; a lesser-quality, lossily compressed JP2 that is used as an access image (this is used for e.g. our newspapers website). The majority […]

Last winter I started a first attempt at identifying preservation risks in PDF files using the Apache Preflight PDF/A validator. This work was later followed up by others in two SPRUCE hackathons in Leeds (see this blog post by Peter Cliff) and London (described here). Much of this later work tacitly assumes that Apache Preflight […]

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 […]