long term

Repository preservation revisited

9 March, 2009

Are institutional repositories set up and resourced to preserve their contents over the long term? Potentially contradictory evidence has emerged from my various questions related to this topic.

Repositories and preservation

23 February, 2009

I have a question about how repository managers view their role in relation to long term preservation.

IDCC4 afternoon research paper session

9 December, 2008

I really want to write about the afternoon research papers at the International Digital Curation Conference, but I start from a great disadvantage. First, I wanted to hear papers in BOTH the parallel sessions, so I ended up dashing between the two (and of course, getting lost)! Then my battery went flat, so no notes, and I left the laptop in the first lecture room while going off to the second… and of course, near the end of that paper, someone came in saying a couple of laptops had been stolen. Panic, mine was OK, thank goodness (when did I last do a proper backup? Ahem!).

Claimed 200 year media life

28 July, 2008

Graeme Pow spotted the announcement a few weeks back of Delkin's Archival Blu-ray media:

Responses to RAW versus TIFF: compression, error and cost-related

2 July, 2008

This is the second post summarising responses to the “RAW versus TIFF” post made originally by Dave Thompson of the Wellcome Library. The key elements of Dave’s post were whether we should be archiving using RAW or TIFF (image-related responses to this question are summarized in a separate post). A subsidiary question on whether we should archive both is greatly affected by cost, which is dependent on issues of compression, errors etc. Responses on these topics are covered in this post.

Responses to RAW versus TIFF: image-related

1 July, 2008

This post summarises image-related responses to the “RAW versus TIFF” post made originally by Dave Thompson of the Wellcome Library. The key elements of Dave’s post were whether we should be archiving images using RAW (which contained more camera and exposure-related data) or TIFF (which was more standardized, likely to be accessible for longer, and had more available utilities). A subsidiary question on whether we should archive both is greatly affected by cost; responses related to this element are summarized in a separate post.

The negative cost repository, and other archive services

4 June, 2008

I've been at a meeting of research libraries here in Philadelphia these past two days; a topic that came up a bit was the sorts of services that libraries might offer individuals and research groups in managing their research collections. I was reminded about my post about internal Edinburgh proposals for an archive service, last year.

Legacy document formats

20 March, 2008

On the O'Reill XML blog, which I always read with interest (particularly in relation to the shenanigins over OOXML and ODF standardisation), Rick Jelliffe writes An Open Letter to Microsoft, IBM/Lotus, Corel and others on Lodging Old File Formats with ISO. He points out that

DCC Forum: Comment on Conference best paper

12 December, 2007

There is a Conference theme over on the DCC Forum. However, despite its RSS feed, it doesn't appear to be quite in the blogosphere, so I thought I would post some quotes from it here. Bridget Robinson announced the best paper selection (it gets a star spot in the programme):

Two fundamentally different views on data curation

10 December, 2007

A few months ago, we interviewed two scientists for two quite different posts in the DCC. Both were from a genomics background, and I was very struck by how strongly held, but from my point of view how narrow, was their view of curation. As a result, I’m beginning to realise that there are two fundamentally different approaches to data curation