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Showing posts from November, 2016

Every little bit helps: File format identification at Lancaster University

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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

AtoM harvesting (part 1) - it works!

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When we first started using Access to Memory (AtoM) to create the Borthwick Catalogue  we were keen to enable our data to be harvested via OAI-PMH (more about this feature of AtoM is available in the documentation ). Indeed the ability to do this was one of our requirements when we were looking to select a new Archival Management System (read about our system requirements here ). Look! Archives now available in Library Catalogue search So it is with great pleasure that I can announce that we are now exposing some of our data from AtoM through our University Library catalogue YorSearch . Dublin Core metadata is automatically harvested nightly from our production AtoM instance - so we don't need to worry about manual updates or old versions of our data hanging around. Our hope is that doing this will allow users of the Library Catalogue (primarily staff and students at the University of York) to happen upon relevant information about the archives that we hold here at the Borthwick wh

Automating transfers with Automation Tools

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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 describes how we have used Artefactual Systems' Automation Tools at York. For Phase three of our 'Filling the Digital Preservation Gap' we have delivered a proof-of-concept implementation to to illustrate how PURE and Archivematica can be used as part of a Research Data management lifecycle. One of the requirements for this work was the ability to fully automate a transfer in Archivematica. Automation Tools is a set of python scripts from Artefactual Systems that are designed to help. The way Automation Tools works is that a script (transfer.py) runs regularly at a set interval (as cron task). The script is fed a set of parameters and, based on these, checks for new transfers in the given transfer source directory. On finding something, a tran

From old York to New York: PASIG 2016

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My walk to the conference on the first day Last week I was lucky enough to attend PASIG 2016 (Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A big thanks to Jisc who generously funded my conference fee and travel expenses. This was the first time I have attended PASIG but I had heard excellent reports from previous conferences and knew I would be in for a treat. On the conference website PASIG is described as "a place to learn from each other's practical experiences, success stories, and challenges in practising digital preservation." This sounded right up my street and I was not disappointed. The practical focus proved to be a real strength. The conference was three days long and I took pages of notes (and lots of photographs!). As always, it would be impossible to cover everything in one blog post so here is a round up of some of my highlights. Apologies to all of those speakers who I haven't mentioned. Bootcamp!  The f