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!
People seem to be moving. You’ll find me on Mastodon and BlueSky.
As I happened to be looking through some 2015 archives today, I made notes of the things I will miss.
twitter wallstwitter sentiment analysistwitter graphstwitter botstwitter history and its use for activismtwitter history and its use for emergent trendstwitter knowledge base and advance searchtwitter serendipity
The history books will be pretty unbelievable when they come to write about it. It may never come back, but it did exist. And it was fun, not until it lasted, because it lasted too long, but until it was no fun no more.
I got a response to my paper PREMIS Events Through an Event-Source Lens.
There are two strange choices made by this response. I’ll touch on the more personal one at the end, but first, what does the response say?
Wikidata is a good service, Wikibase (on which Wikidata is built) is a better platform.
I have spoken before about its potential to be added into the file-format registry ecosystem in a federated model.
If we are to use it as a registry that can perhaps complement the pipelines going into PRONOM, e.g. in vendor’s digital preservation platforms such as the Rosetta Format Library, a Wikidata should be able to output different serializations of signature file for tools such as Siegfried, DROID or FIDO.
And what about DROID?
In 2019 I was staying in Hamburg for a short amount of time while I was waiting for my Canadian visa. It was around the time of the iPRES digital preservation conference and I was only a few hours away. While I hoped my work would send me it was not going to be my year. I then hoped I would take myself there anyway by writing a computer game; inspired by Board Games sessions in 2017 and 2018. Alas, that didn’t work out either, but I did end up with a piece of work I am still very proud of.
Nibble in Cyberspace: Digipres Adventures, Vol 1. Homepage: https://ross-spencer.github.io/nibble/
With thanks to the sponsorship of Archives New Zealand and Richard Lehane for his great coding expertise and his collaboration; Demystify Lite has a new feature — Siegfried!!
Richard recently posted about this work on LinkedIn but lets look at this effort in more detail below.
