The HTML Working Group Chairs and the Protocols and Formats WG Chair have proposed a plan for making HTML5 a Recommendation by the end of 2014. Features would be postponed to subsequent releases as necessary.
Accomplishing this, of course, requires that the proposal be accepted by the end of 2014.
Applications for SPRUCE Awards are now open.
SPRUCE will make awards of up to £5k available for further developing the practical digital preservation outcomes and/or development of digital preservation business cases, that were begun in SPRUCE events. Applications from others may also be considered, but in this case, please discuss your proposal with SPRUCE before submission. A total fund of £60k is available for making these awards, which will be allocated in a series of funding calls thoughout the life of the SPRUCE Project.
The current (open) call is primarily for attendees of the SPRUCE Mashup London.
Awards must be submitted by 5 PM (GMT, I suppose) on October 10, 2012.
The self-promotion part: Awards are made to teams affiliated with institutions, but they are permitted to use outside help, since in-house developers may already be fully committed. As an independent developer with expertise in file formats and digital preservation, I’d like it known that I’m available to contract for carrying out a SPRUCE project. My business home page describes my background and skills. Paul Wheatley has told me this is a possibility, so I’m not just coming out of the blue with this offer.
My schedule may change, of course, but if you contact me on a project I’ll keep you updated on my status, and I’ll follow through in full on any commitment I make.
Comments Off on Spruce Awards: signal boost and self-promotion
Posted in consulting, News
Tagged JISC, preservation, software
I’ve posted an updated version of my file format registry browser (Zip file). It’s still very experimental, but this one makes several steps on the long path to being a useful tool.
The biggest news is that thanks to David Underdown’s input, it now talks to PRONOM. Preserv2 is probably a lost cause, since it appears no current work is being done on it and its useful results were folded back into PRONOM. This version tries to prettify results containing URIs and “@en” tags. If you don’t like that you can turn it off with a check box. The search fields have changed, and all of them now do something with all registries. The logging level can now be controlled from the config file (src/com/mcgath/regbrowser/config.properties). In some future version I’ll use a less buried config file.
Here’s my post on the first release.
I’ve made my experimental format registry browser available for download. It requires Java 5 or higher and a GUI environment, and Ant is required if you want to make changes. Currently it queries DBPedia and UDFR. It’s been tested on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.
There’s now a build of JHOVE with some more changes, incorporating new code for finding the PDF trailer and making several fixes in PDF-A checking. The full build is a pain to do, so what I’ve done is uploaded a zip file that contains just the revised bin directory.
To use it, make a copy of JHOVE 1.7 (don’t blow away your old one!) and replace the bin directory with the bin directory from the zip file. Please give feedback on any problems encountered; this is definitely not a stable release.
I’ve put a new test build of the GUI version of JHOVE on SourceForge. This addresses one of the most persistent problems: the configuration file. If it can’t find the expected configuration file, it creates a default version.
I’ve tested this on a Mac and an Ubuntu box, but not on Windows, which is the toughest case because of its different and changing file system conventions. I’d greatly appreciate feedback on whether it works right on Windows, and which version you’ve tested with.
The OAIS reference model is a central piece of digital preservation. a new version (PDF), identified as CCSDS 650.0-M-2, has been released. It’s dated June 2012 but seems to have been publicly available for only a short time. Most people who know about OIAS know about SIPs, AIPs, and DIPs and not too much more, and I’m pretty much among the unlearned masses here, so I’ll just refer you to Barbara Sierman’s article, OAIS 2012 update, which has a summary of the important changes.
iPRES 2012 now has real information on its website.
After well over a year, a new version of JHOVE is finally available. Really, not very much has changed since 1.6 as far as the software itself goes. However, I’m leaving Harvard at the end of August and asked for and got custody of JHOVE, so this version marks its transition from a Harvard-supported project (which, in practice, it hasn’t been for a long time) to a separate open-source project. The JHOVE web pages are now hosted on SourceForge, and all support and discussion will go through SourceForge. The jhove-support and jhove-users mailing lists hosted by Harvard will shut down in the near future.
This doesn’t mean JHOVE is dead. I may actually have more opportunities to work on it than before, now that I’m going into independent consulting. I need to stay visible to the library and preservation world, and this is one way to do it.
Meanwhile, I’m looking for contract opportunities. Please take a look at my new business site or my LinkedIn profile.
The web pages for JHOVE are now on SourceForge. They’ll remain on the Harvard site for some period of time but won’t be further updated.
There’s at least a chance this means there will be a release of JHOVE soon. Yes, I know, I’ve been promising that for a long time.
Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek, an e-book to bring the message of digital preservation to the broader geek world.
Mad File Format Science 