iPRES 2010 (September 19-24, Vienna) has issued a call for papers. Submissions are due by May 5, and final versions by July 11.
There’s now a user guide online for Harvard University Libraries’ File Information Tool Set (FITS). FITS extracts technical metadata using serveral different tools, including JHOVE, Exiftool, NLNZ Metadata Extractor, DROID, FFIdent, and File Utility.
Does anyone reading this know if FFIdent is still alive somewhere on the Web? A web search for it turns up nothing useful, and the number 1 hit is the FITS site itself.
Argh! I always forget something in a JHOVE build, and carefully checking all the nitpicking things just means I forget the important ones.
The JHOVE 1.5 which I uploaded to SourceForge a few days ago had all the right sources, release notes, checksums, etc. … but it didn’t have up-to-date JAR files, which kind of defeats the whole point!!
This is now fixed. If you’ve already downloaded it, please download it again. Check your download against the corresponding MD5 file to be sure.
A happy holiday-of-your-choice to all!
JHOVE 1.5 is now out, and so far no one’s complained of anything missing. If you notice any problems, please comment.
Thanks to Thomas Ledoux, JHOVE now has an option to output TextMD metadata. There are minor bug fixes for PDF and UTF-8. Full details are in the release notes.
W3C XML Schema Definition Language 1.1 has reached the status of Last Call Working Draft. The Last Call period ends at the end of December.
Robert Darnton has announced the appointment of Helen Shenton as deputy director of the Harvard University Libraries. She comes from the British Library and has a strong background in digital preservation. I’m particularly intrigued that she “masterminded the creation of the high-density, low-oxygen robotic depository of the BL at Boston Spa” (the other Boston).
By way of Digitization 101: ECA 2010, the 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving, will be held in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 28-30, 2010. The announcement is in German; here’s a quick translation.
From April 28 through 30, 2010, the European Converence on Digital Archiving will take place in Geneva. This stands in the tradition of European archiving conferences of the last decade. With the accent on the digital, and archiving as a function rather than the archive as an institution, the conference will set new priorities. The future will be digital; we will maintain the analog tradition; the archive of the future must have a safe refuge for the analog and digital trails of the past. That is our responsibility.
We are sure that you can expect an attractive and rich conference program.
I know German, but not natively, so I offer my apologies for any clumsiness and mixed metaphors.
A report on CNET says that Microsoft will be publicly documenting the formats of .pst files used by Outlook. Microsoft’s Paul Lorimer is quoted as saying the format specification will be available “under our Open Specification Promise, which will allow anyone to implement the .pst file format on any platform and in any tool, without concerns about patents, and without the need to contact Microsoft in any way.” No timetable is given.
Unicode 5.2.0 is now out. It adds 6,648 new characters but still doesn’t officially include Klingon.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t in California for the post-iPres workshop on JHOVE2, but there is some information online. The JHOVE2 project presentations page includes a short and a long version of the slides. An early version of the code has been made available for testing and progress continues.
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 