When you offer expert advice on something, such as digital preservation, you have to admit your own errors. I very nearly lost my 2016 tax return. When I tried to open it in TurboTax, the application just did nothing. I hadn’t exported it to a generally usable format. The TurboTax file format is proprietary and opaque.
Continue reading
Today is International Digital Preservation Day.
AM26N. This is a one-day sale, so get it now if you don’t already have it!
This XKCD cartoon showed up in my Twitter feed more times in one day than any previous one, for reasons that should be obvious.
Comments Off on Digital Resource Lifespan
Is PDF/A a good archival format? Many institutions use it, but it has problems which are inherent in PDF. With PDF/A-3, it has lost some of its focus. A format which can be a container for any kind of content isn’t great for digital preservation.
An article by Marco Klindt of the Zuse Institute Berlin takes a strong position against its suitability, with the title “PDF/A considered harmful for digital preservation.” Carl Wilson at the Open Preservation Foundation has added his own thoughts with “PDF/A and Long Term Preservation.”
The Library of Congress has reorganized its site on file format sustainability and given it a new URL. (The old one redirects there.) A blog entry discusses the change. Relationships among formats are a big part of the site. It’s significant, for instance, that the MP3 encoding and the de facto MP3 file format get separate entries.
My reactions are mixed. When you click “Format Descriptions” on the main page, you get a page titled “Format Description Categories.” The nesting description at the top says you’re in “Format Descriptions as XML.” Eight categories are listed, and two formats plus “All xxx format descriptions” are listed under each category. There’s no obvious reason why those two formats get special prominence, or what the page has to do with XML.
Continue reading
Comments Off on New look and URL for LoC formats site
Posted in News
Tagged Library of Congress, preservation
My brief post yesterday on the TI/A initiative provoked a lively discussion on Twitter, mostly on whether archival formats should allow compression. The argument against compression rests on the argument that archives should be able to deal with files that have a few bit errors in them. This is a badly mistaken idea.
Continue reading
My article on “File Format Analysis Tools for Archivists” is up on LWN.net.
Comments Off on File format analysis tools for archivists
Today’s XKCD comic comments on digital preservation in Randall Munroe’s usual style.
Continue reading
How big a concern is physical degradation of files, aka “bit rot,” to digital preservation? Should archives eschew data compression in order to minimize the effect of lost bits? In most of my experience, no one’s raised that as a major concern, but some contributors to the TI/A initiative consider it important enough to affect their recommendations.
Continue reading
Comments Off on Are uncompressed files better for preservation?
Posted in commentary
Tagged compression, preservation, TIFF
Google Docs: Not a File Format
What’s the format of a Google Docs file? The question may not even be meaningful. According to Jenny Mitcham at the University of York, there is no such thing as a Google Docs file. What you see when you open a document is an assembly of information from a database. You can export it in various file formats, but the exported file isn’t identical to the Google document.
This makes them risky from a preservation standpoint. You can’t save a local backup of a document. If you lose your Google account, or if censorship in your country cuts you off from it, you lose all your documents.
Continue reading →
Leave a comment
Posted in commentary
Tagged Google, preservation