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Showing posts from March, 2017

Want to learn about Archivematica whilst watching the ducks?

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We are really excited to be hosting the first European Archivematica Camp here at the University of York next month - on the 4-6th April. Don't worry - there will be no tents or campfires...but there may be some wildlife on the lake. The Ron Cooke Hub on a frosty morning - hoping for some warmer weather for Camp! The event is taking place at the Ron Cooke Hub over on our Heslington East campus. If you want to visit the beautiful City of York (OK, I'm biased!) and meet other European Archivematica users (or Archivematica explorers) this event is for you. Artefactual Systems will be leading the event and the agenda is looking very full and interesting. I'm most looking forward to learning more about the workflows that other Archivematica users have in place or are planning to implement. One of these lakeside 'pods' will be our breakout room There are still places left and you can register for Camp here  or contact the organisers at info@artefactual.com. ...and if yo

How can we preserve our wiki pages

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I was recently prompted by a colleague to investigate options for preserving institutional wiki pages. At the University of York we use the Confluence wiki and this is available for all staff to use for a variety of purposes. In the Archives we have our own wiki space on Confluence which we use primarily for our meeting agendas and minutes. The question asked of me was how can we best capture content on the wiki that needs to be preserved for the long term?  Good question and just the sort of thing I like to investigate. Here are my findings... Space export The most sensible way to approach the transfer of a set of wiki pages to the digital archive would be to export them using the export options available within the Space Tools. The main problem with this approach is that a user will need to have the necessary permissions on the wiki space in order to be able to use these tools ...I found that I only had the necessary permissions on those wiki spaces that I administer myself. There a

Thumbs.db – what are they for and why should I care?

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Recent work I’ve been doing on the digital archive has made me think a bit more about those seemingly innocuous files that Windows (XP, Vista, 7 and 8) puts into any directory that has images in – Thumbs.db. Getting your folder options right helps! Windows uses a file called Thumbs.db to create little thumbnail images of any images within a directory. It stores one of these files in each directory that contains images and it is amazing how quickly they proliferate. Until recently I wasn’t aware I had any in my digital archive at all. This is because although my preferences in Windows Explorer were set to display hidden files, the "Hide protected operating system files" option also needs to be disabled in order to see files such as these. The reason I knew I had all these Thumbs.db files was through a piece of DROID analysis work published last month . Thumbs.db ranked at number 12 in my list of the most frequently occurring file formats in the digital archive. I had 210 of th