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Showing posts from July, 2016

On the closure of Edina's Unlock service

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This is a guest post by Julie Allinson, Technology Development Manager for Library & Archives at York. Julie managed the technical side of the ' York's Archbishops' Registers Revealed ' project. This post discusses the demise of Edina's Unlock service and wonders how sustainable open data services are. It has recently come to my attention that Edina are retiring their ' Unlock ' service on the 31st July 2016. Currently that's all I know as, AFAIK, Edina haven't provided any background or any information about why, or what users of this service might do instead. I also wasn't aware of any kind of consultation with users. Edina's message about the Unlock service - not very informative.  At York we've been using Unlock to search the DEEP gazetteer of English place names in our Archbishops' Registers editing tool. DEEP is a fantastic resource, an online gazetteer of the 86 volume corpus of the Survey of English Place-Names (SEPN). Wit

New research data file formats now available in PRONOM

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Like all good digital archivists I am interested in file formats and how we can use tools to automatically identify them. This is primarily so that when we package our digital archives up for long term preservation we can do so with a level of knowledge about how we might go about preserving and providing access to them in the future. This information is key whether migration or emulation is the preservation or access strategy of choice (or indeed a combination of both). It has been really valuable to have some time and money as part of our "Filling the Digital Preservation Gap" project to be able to investigate issues around the identification of research data file formats and very pleasing to see the latest PRONOM signature release on 29th June which includes a couple of research data formats that we have sponsored as part of our project work. I sent a batch of sample files off to the team who look after PRONOM at The National Archives (TNA) with a bit of contextual inform

Modelling Research Data with PCDM

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This is a guest post by Julie Allinson, Technology Development Manager for Library & Archives at York. Julie has been working on York's implementation for the 'Filling the Digital Preservation Gap' project. This post discusses preliminary work to define a data model for 'datasets'. For Phase three of our 'Filling the Digital Preservation Gap', I've been working on implementing a prototype to illustrate how PURE and Archivematica can be used as part of a Research Data management lifecycle. Our technology stack at York is Hydra and Fedora 4 but it's an important aspect of the project to ensure that the thinking behind the prototype is applicable to other stacks. Central to adding any kind of data to a research information system, repository or preservation tool is the data model that underpins the metadata. For this I've been making use of the Portland Common Data Model (PCDM) and it's various extensions (particularly Works ). In the past