Blogs: SPRUCE

Lovebytes currently holds an archive of digital media assets representing 19 years of the organisation’s activities in the field of digital art and a rich historical record of emerging digital culture at the turn of the century. It contains original artworks in a wide variety of formats, video and audio documentation of events alongside websites […]

The preservation of audio CDs is something that is slightly different from the preservation of CDs containing data other than audio. Data on audio CDs cannot be easily cloned for preservation, as the music industry has lobbied the main operating system developers to curtail the duplication of CDs to crack down on the mass production […]

Almost a year ago, I presented a proposal to the Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP) group to create a community tool registry. I was frustrated by the profusion of tool registries and the lack of coordination between them. Pooling the knowledge in one place would result in a far better resource. It would […]

Using the Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit to justify Digital Repository investment Northumberland Estates (NE) were delighted to be awarded a SPRUCE Award to carry out a detailed analysis of current digital repository solutions suitable for small to medium organisations. In conjunction with The University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) they created a toolkit justifying […]

FITS is a classic case of a great digital preservation tool that was developed with an initial injection of resource, and subsequently the creator (Harvard University) has then struggled to maintain it. But let me be very clear, Harvard deserves no blame for this situation. They've created a tool that many in our community have […]

Help! Digital Repositories As part of the SPRUCE Project Awards, Northumberland Estates are currently assessing digital repository solutions which will result in the creation of an associated business case justifying investment in a recommended solution. The business case will aim to implement a sustainable digital repository for the long term management of Northumberland Estates digital […]

We are now into the final few months of the SPRUCE Project and we're beginning to complete some key outputs from the project. A key aim has been to encourage and support digital preservation activity in the UK from both a technical and business perspective. So we wanted to support practitioners in bringing in the […]

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 […]

As I have previously blogged, our community's attempts to share knowledge and experience of digital preservation tools has been a triumph of good-willed enthusiam over coordination and collaboration. Rather than pooling our tool knowledge we have spread it around the web in list after list and registry after registry. The result is not particularly helpful. […]

As you may or may not know, C3PO is a content profiling tool for preservation analysis. It reads in characterisation meta data and gives you the possibility to aggregate it and/or to visualise it.   The first versions of C3PO generated quite a lot of interest within the digital preservation community, which was a clear […]