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.
I’ll be at the Sun PASIG (Preservation and Archives SIG) at Northeastern University tomorrow.
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).
The current version of libtiff, a widely used C library for processing TIFF images, is found on remotesensing.org. The domain libtiff.org used to belong to the people who maintain libtiff but doesn’t any more. The holder of the domain claims to be “Lib Tiff” in Ottawa. It’s not a fraud or malware site, but it has an outdated version of libtiff. I don’t know what the domain holder’s game is, and I’m not sure anyone does. I can’t even see how it’s making money; maybe it has popups which my browser is suppressing?
Anyway, I got curious about how various search engines would do when I searched for “libtiff.” Here’s the rundown:
It’s not clear exactly what this proves, except that the big names don’t always do the best.
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.
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 
Flash “vs.” HTML? Not so.
CNET has a rather confused article titled “HTML vs. Flash: Can a turf war be avoided?” This is like asking whether a turf war can be avoided between mixing bowls and batter.
The article says: “Bruce Lawson, Web standards evangelist for browser maker Opera Software, believes HTML and the other technologies inevitably will replace Flash and already collectively are ‘very close’ to reproducing today’s Flash abilities.” Further on: “Perhaps the most visible HTML5 aspect is built-in support for audio and video.”
This is complete nonsense. HTML 5 does not include “built-in support” for video. All that it does is provide a standardized means for browsers to support it. The video and audio tags provide a standardized means of expressing video and audio content, but don’t define any means of interpreting the content. That’s left up to the browser, just as it is with HTML 4 with its lack of standardized media tags. The browser can support MPEG 4, Flash, Ogg, all of them, none of them, or something else entirely.
Perhaps author Stephen Shankland is thinking of a different issue. There are some Web pages whose content is made up entirely of Flash. If you bring them up on a browser where Flash support is lacking or disabled, you generally get a blank page, not even a clue about what’s wrong. This could be considered Flash vs. HTML competition, but it’s an area where Flash has no excuse for being there and deserves to be beaten. The appropriate use of Flash, to present animation and video, is actually better supported by HTML 5 than by earlier versions, and the idea that the technologies compete is meaningless.
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