ross spencer :: exponentialdecay [-dot-] co [-dot-] uk :: blog
Digital preservation analyst, researcher, and software developer
It is very poetic to think about code as it containing the memory of its maintainers. I don’t entirely disagree with the idea, but it’s overly poetic and the reality of maintenance on systems that have become too unwieldy is anything but poetic.
Tyler’s recent blog post for the PRONOM Hack-a-thon Week 2024 (my previous for this week), brought up an interesting point about two of PRONOM’s oldest outline records, Real Video Clip (fmt/204) and Real Video (x-fmt/277). How did they end up in PRONOM?
NB. because of the complexity of this post, it may be easier to read in original blog form, than on Mastodon here: https://exponentialdecay.co.uk/blog/pronoms-dustiest-records/
Tyler suggests:
I assume PRONOM originally added these based on MIME types available.
I thought I knew the answer, but it prompted a forensic look at the records to see if what I thought I knew aligned with reality!
