OAIS

OAIS version for public examination

14 May, 2009

Thanks to David Giaretta for the following information on the state of the revision to OAIS (I have commented earlier on this process):OAIS version for public examinationMany comments and ideas for clarifications and improvements for OAIS were received as part of its 5 year review process.

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.

Email discussion on the usefulness of file format specifications

6 January, 2009

This is a summary of an email exchange on the DCC Associates email list over a few days in late November, early December. I thought it was revealing of attitudes to preservation formats and to representation information (in the form of both specifications and running code), so I’ve summarised it here. Emails lists are great for promoting discussion, but threads tend to fracture off in various directions, so a summary can be useful. Quotes are reproduced with permission; my thanks to all those involved.

Comments on OAIS responses to our comments on OAIS

9 December, 2008

Yes, it sounds weird and it was, a bit. One of the workshops at the International Digital Curation Conference was to consider the proposed "dispositions" to the DCC/DPC comments on OAIS, made around two years ago! Sarah Higgins of the DCC and Frances Boyle of the DPC had an initial look and tried to work out which proposed dispositions we might have an issue with.

Some interesting posts elsewhere

5 November, 2008

I’m sorry for the gap in posting; I’ve been taking a couple of weeks of leave at the end of my trip to Australia. Since return I’ve been catching up on my blog reading, and there are some interesting posts around.

iPres 2008 Preservation planning session

29 September, 2008

Starting with Dirk von Suchodoletz from Freiburg, talking about emulation. I’ve always had a problem with emulation; perhaps I’ve too long a memory of those early days of MS-DOS, when emulators were quite good at running well-behaved programs, but were rubbish at many common programs, which broke the rule-book and went straight into the interrupt vectors to get performance. OK, if you’re not that old, maybe emulation does work better these days, and is even getting trendy under the new name of virtualisation.

OAIS revision moving forward?

8 September, 2008

Just over a year ago, in late August 2007 I wondered what was happening with the required review of the Open Archival Information System standard, which was announced in June 2006, and for which comments closed in October 2006. Well, there is at last some movement.

Claimed 200 year media life

28 July, 2008

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

JIF08 Technical Infrastructure session

16 July, 2008

At the second day of the JISC Innovation Forum, I attended an interesting discussion in the data theme on technical infrastructures. This post derives from that discussion, but is neither a complete reflection of what was said, nor at all in the order of discussion; it reflects some bits I found interesting. My thanks to Matthew Dovey who chaired, and to all who contributed; I’ve identified none rather than only some! The session is also being blogged here…

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.