The UK National Archive quietly released DROID 6.2 this month. I noticed only because of some mentions on Twitter. The file dates indicate the update was released on February 16. Here’s the new portion of the changelog:
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Here’s a new YouTube video of mine illustrating some ExifTool techniques for figuring out why files behave strangely. It also serves as a teaser for my new course on ExifTool.
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Almost all the published books on digital preservation are academic writing for a very limited audience. My own Files that Last wasn’t intended for a tiny audience but ended up that way. The chances look better for Abby Smith Rumsey’s upcoming When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future.
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My latest Udemy course, Managing Metadata with ExifTool, is now live! The list price is $36, but with the link here it’s just $12 through the end of February. OK, to tell the truth, Udemy’s payment structure practically mandates setting high prices and then discounting heavily, but this introductory rate is the best one you’ll see for a while.
As far as I can tell, this is the only publicly available tutorial on ExifTool which covers the topic so thoroughly. Here’s the outline:
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Preservica has introduced a catchy campaign warning people against letting their files become “eX-files.” It includes a downloadable PDF, “Safeguarding your Vital Long-term Electronics Records.” (You have to provide your email address to download it, and you may have to turn off ad blocking temporarily to see the form where you do that.)
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The 3-D printing industry has been moving toward 3MF as a standard file format. It’s an XML-based format that claims to offer extensibility, interoperability, and freedom from the problems of other formats. The specification includes an XSD schema. I’m no judge of how suitable it is for 3D modeling, but yes, it is extensible. In fact, it’s designed with a relatively lean core model, so additional features can be added as extensions.
A recent Fortune article, “Why These Big Companies Want a New 3D File Format”, discusses 3MF from a business standpoint.
The old STL format, based on tessellation, is widely used, but it’s been criticized for generating huge files and lacking features.
A change after a version number’s decimal point is usually minor or moderate, but the creators of the EPUB 3.1 draft at IDPF call their changes from 3.01 “radical.”
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The Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (Saxon State and University Library Dresden), which somehow gets abbreviated to SLUB, has developed a tool for working with TIFF files in digital preservation. fixit_tiff is a command line utility, written in C, which can do some repairs on defective TIFF files. The focus appears to be on correcting common errors, not on repairing corrupted files. A blog post from July (in German) indicates it can do configurable validation using a simple query language.
It’s available under the same license as Libtiff. Just what is that license? The only thing I can find is a very outdated “Use and Copyright” statement, which is on a page so old it warns about patents on LZW compression. It’s available for free, anyway.
The British Library’s Digital Preservation Team has issued a report on WAV Format Preservation Assessment. It cites the broad adoption of WAV and its extension BWF (Broadcast Wave Format) as a positive for preservation purposes and offers only a few cautions. I’m flattered by the recommendation, “Wherever possible and appropriate to the workflow, submitted content should be validated using JHOVE.”
NASA is using a format for online files, called MRF (Meta Raster Format), which is claimed to deliver images ten times as fast as JPEG2000 from cloud services when used with a compression algorithm called LERC. LERC is under patent by Esri, which says the technique is especially suited for geospatial applications and makes the algorithm “freely available to the geospatial and earth sciences community.” An implementation of MRF from NASA is available on GitHub under the Apache license, and an implementation of LERC is on GitHub from Esri.
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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 