Here’s a new video on viewing publicly available information in the Harvard Library’s Digital Collections, Harvard Geospatial Library (HGL), and Visual Information Access (VIA).
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A new video on my YouTube channel offers a seven-minute introduction to JHOVE. This is a teaser for my upcoming video course on file format identification tools, as well as a public test of the techniques I’ve been developing. It’s a screen capture video, and I cover the GUI version, even if it’s not as widely used, because it lets me focus on the concepts, and because it’s silly to teach a command line application in a video.
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My video for today briefly covers graphic file formats from the forties to the present. I made some interesting discoveries along the way, especially Laposky’s CRT “Oscillons.”
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This is my very first YouTube video, intended to give starting-level computer science students an idea of some of the basic issues of file formats. Suggestions on how to make future ones better, in terms of both content and technique, are welcome. If I get serious about these, I’ll invest in something better than the very painful iMovie.
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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 
The digital preservation song challenge!
Should there be songs about digital preservation? This is just a special case of the question, “Should there be songs about X?” For nearly all X, the answer is “Yes, and there probably are!” (Even — perhaps especially — if there shouldn’t be, there are.)
Someone in the Australiasian preservation community asked if AusPreserves needed a theme song. The first responses were existing popular songs, but then people started getting more creative. This led to the Digital Preservation Song Challenge!
One response was the Beyonce parody, “All the Corrupt Files” (“Put a checksum on it”). I think it’s the first song ever to mention JHOVE!
Naturally, I already have my own song on digital preservation, called Files that Last. I wrote it to promote my book of the same title, but it stands (or falls) by itself.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth singing about, and that certainly applies to digital preservation!
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Posted in commentary, News, Video
Tagged music, preservation