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Showing posts from August, 2016

Filling the Digital Preservation Gap - a brief update

As we near the end of the active phase of Filling the Digital Preservation Gap * here is a brief update about where we are with the main strands of work we highlighted in our phase 3 kick off blog post . Archivematica implementation Work at York Work is ongoing at York to get our proof of concept implementation of Archivematica up and running. The purpose of this work was not to get a production service in place but to demonstrate that the implementation plan we published in our phase 2 report was feasible. The implementation we are developing pulls metadata (about deposited research datasets) from PURE and provides a method for capturing additional information for managing datasets  (filling some of the information gaps that are not collected through the PURE datasets module). It also includes an automated process to ingest deposited datasets (along with their metadata) into Archivematica, package them up for longer term preservation and provide a dissemination copy of the dataset to

My first file format signature

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As part of Filling the Digital Preservation Gap we've been doing a lot of talking about the importance of accurate file format identification and the challenges of doing so for research data. Now we are thinking about how we can help solve the problem. As promised in a post last month, I wanted to have a go at file format signature creation for PRONOM to see whether it is something that an average digital archivist could get their head around. Never before had I created my own signature. In the past I had considered this to be work that only technical people could carry out and it would be foolhardy to attempt it myself. However, given the extent of the file formats identification challenge for research data  wouldn't it be great if the community could engage more directly? Also, shouldn't file signature development be something every digital archivist should have a good understanding of? Encouraged by Ross Spencer's blog post Five Star File Format Signature Development

Research data is different

This is a guest post from Simon Wilson who has been profiling the born-digital data at the Hull History Centre to provide another point of comparison with the research data at York reported on in this blog back in May. Inspired by Jen’s blog  Research data - what does it *really* look like?  about the profile of the  research data at York and the responses it generated including that from the Bentley Historical Library , I decided to take a look at some of the born-digital archives we have at Hull. This data is not research data from academics, it is data that has been donated to or deposited with the Hull History Centre and it comes from a variety of different sources. Whilst I had previously created a DROID  report for each distinct accession I have never really looked into the detail, so for each accession I did the following; Run the DROID software and export the results into csv format with one row per file  Open the file in MS Excel and copy the data to a second tab for the subse