Every little bit helps: File format identification at Lancaster University
This is a guest post from Rachel MacGregor , Digital Archivist at Lancaster University. Her work on identifying research data follows on from the work of Filling the Digital Preservation Gap and provides a interesting comparison with the statistics reported in a previous blog post and our final project report . Here at Lancaster University I have been very inspired by the work at York on file format identification and we thought it was high time I did my own analysis of the one hundred or so datasets held here. The aim is to aid understanding of the nature of research data as well as to inform our approaches to preservation. Our results are comparable to York's in that the data is characterised as research data (as yet we don't have any born digital archives or digitised image files). I used DROID (version 6.2.1) as the tool for file identification - there are others and it would be interesting to compare results at some stage with results from using other software such a