outreach Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

Crayola's 1997 Techno Brite crayon set with color names created to market the Crayola website, including names featured here such as World Wide Web Yellow, Point and Click Green, and Cyber Space Orange

Looking after your URLs: tikalinkextract eight years on

We might not have a second life, but what if I told you there was a second internet? Not the deep web, but another web that we engage with nearly every day?

Think about it, that QR code you scanned for more information? That payment link you followed on your electricity bill? The website you’re told to visit at the end of a television ad?

The antipodes of the internet are these terminal endpoints, material and not necessarily material objects that represent the end of the freely navigable web — the QR code on a concert poster is the web printed onto the physical world. There is every chance it will be scanned and followed by someone from a mobile device, but it’s a transient object, something that will exist for a short amount of time, and then disappear into the palimpsest of the poster board or wall it was pasted on until it eventually disappears.

This is part of the materiality of the internet that has long fascinated me. Perhaps it comes from being a student of material culture, but if we look around, we see the Internet everywhere!

A poem by Kay Ryan - An Elephant in the Room The room is almost all elephant. Almost none of it isn't. Pretty much solid elephant. So there's no room to talk about it.

Interviewing in digital preservation: a duty of care and community

Sometime in 2024, I received zero feedback for a job interview—one of at least five interviews without any feedback in the last eight years.

The thing is, digital preservation is very niche. Those five roles probably represent a good number of institutions actually hiring specialists and likely represent some of the best chances for jobs in the future.

Not getting a role is part and parcel of interviewing, but in not providing feedback, a didactic moment was lost—a moment of community connection and outreach—and simply an act of care.

Furthermore, loops are not closed, processes feel incomplete, and of course, you will likely know the person who gets the role ahead of you. Trying to measure yourself against that individual will likely be in the back of your mind when you next meet or work with these individuals because you have been left questioning by the recruiter.

And before it is suggested that this is just a ‘you’ thing—let’s say conservatively, five people interviewed for each of the five positions I applied for. Assuming everyone is treated equally, that’s 20 people missing out on something critical to improving their skill set, interview technique, or helping them find more suitable jobs in the future. I guarantee, you ALL deserve feedback. It is also 20 people that each recruiter has missed an active opportunity to build a stronger bond with, who will sing the praises of the process and the organization; this is important.

Cat's Meow from the Offner Dynograph EEG

What will you bitflip today?

I want to let you into a secret: I enjoy corruption. Corrupting digital objects leads to undefined behavior (C++’s definition is fun). And flipping bits in objects can tell us something both about the fragility, and robustness of our digital files and the applications that work with them.

I had a pull-request for bitflip accepted the other day. Bitflip is by Antoine Grondin and is a simple utility for flipping bits in digital files. I wrote in my COPTR entry for it that it reminds me of shotGun by Manfred Thaller. The utility is exceptionally easy to use (and of course update and maintain written in Golang) and has some nice features for flipping individual bits or a uniform percentage of bits across a digital file.

My pull-request was a simple one updating Goreleaser and its GitHub workflow to provide binaries for Windows and FreeBSD. I only needed to use Windows for a short amount of time thankfully, but it’s an environment I believe is prevalent for a lot of digital preservationists in corporate IT environments.

Bitflip is a useful utility to improve your testing of digital preservation systems, or simply for outreach, but let’s have a quick look at it in action.

Tyler's Halloween Matryoshka Dolls represent the internal complexities of container file formats. The dolls here have formats attached to them representing different ways they might be nested, with ZIP and OLE2 being the primary containers that can be handled in DROID and Siegfried at present.

A year in file formats 2024

A great write up from Francesca at TNA about the past year for PRONOM via Georgia at the OPF.

It’s great to see the continuing work including vital translation of guides into other languages. Francesca includes a couple of shout outs to some pieces I have contributed in my spare time this year; including a collaborative workshop with Francesca, David, and Tyler at iPRES2024.

Image of Spadina Quay Wetland Toronto, taken in 2017

We love our fiefdoms: The DPC and Wikidata

Andy Jackson is doing some positive work for the DPC, especially in his low-level look at Wikidata recently (external blog).…

iPRES2024: Self-sovereign-digital preservation: The reviewers enjoyed your submission, but… what reviewers???

*Knocking gently on the door* “is anyone there, iPRES2024“? One thing I didn’t make clear in my previous iPRES2024 post…

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

In March I was invited by the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group to talk about my experiences using Wikibase with Siegfried, the file format identification tool. I don’t think I’ve talked about that work on here before but you can find links to my iPRES talk on my ORCID page.

Let’s look at the abstract and the content of the talk below.

OPFCON: How has OPF contributed to the international digital preservation community? Where would this community be without OPF?

Last Wednesday and in another life, pre-COVID pandemic, I would have been visiting Vienna again. I visited for the digital preservation conference iPRES for the first time in 2010, and lived there for a short period of time last year.

Now, we’re in the midst of a pandemic and the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) 10th Anniversary Event could not happen in person but the OPF found a way anyway, and so 9-10 June 2020 became the online event OPFCON.

Fortunate enough have an abstract of mine be considered worthy of a panel towards the end of the event I was able to reflect on the last 10 years. My notes on those and the panel can be found below.

Header for my talk at the Vienna Institute for Historical Research, reflecting on community and self-development in digital preservation. I touch upon, among other things, community, recognizing privilege, and finding value and meaning in digital records.

Digital preservation at the coalface: or how I learned that glamping doesn’t always involve the vast wilderness

The last Friday of March this year, I was invited by Elizabeth Kata at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to give a presentation at the Vienna Institute for Historical Research (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung). I don’t have a transcript for that day or a complete set of notes that I followed, but here is the essence of the talk. In it, Reflecting on community and self-development in digital preservation; I touch upon, among other things, community, recognizing privilege, and finding value and meaning in digital records.

I began and ended the talk by singing two Waiata, an important part of my previous role at Archives New Zealand.

Te Manaaki taonga

Te Manaaki taonga
E whakarauika ana I te tini e
E ranga ana I te tira
Hei huruhuru moo te manu ka rere
Hei Poutuumaaro mo te kainga
Tuituinga koorero tuituinga tangata
Manaaki taaonga manaaki tangata
(Tane chant: Tuituinga koorero tuituinga tangata.
Manaaki taaonga manaki tangata – Hi!)
(Last time Wahine join chant: manaaki tangata – Hi!)

The value/prestige in protecting treasures
They gather/connect the people like the gathering of fish
They weave the party/masses
To be like feathers of a bird that takes flight
To be a strong pillar for our home
The sewing of stories, the sewing of people
The protection of treasures the protection of people

My GLAM: Sitting at the Coalface

Back in October a good friend of mine at the Australian Society of Archivists Victoria Branch asked me to write a short piece describing ‘My GLAM’. I adopted the theme, “Sitting at the Coalface”.

GLAM stands for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. In the article I described where my focus in the digital preservation world has been for the last decade. I also suggested that one letter was missing from GLAM: ‘P’ for ‘people’.

The full text of this short piece is below.

Tag: outreach

Looking after your URLs: tikalinkextract eight years on

Interviewing in digital preservation: a duty of care and community

What will you bitflip today?

A year in file formats 2024

We love our fiefdoms: The DPC and Wikidata

iPRES2024: Self-sovereign-digital preservation: The reviewers enjoyed your submission, but… what reviewers???

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

OPFCON: How has OPF contributed to the international digital preservation community? Where would this community be without OPF?

Digital preservation at the coalface: or how I learned that glamping doesn’t always involve the vast wilderness

Te Manaaki taonga

My GLAM: Sitting at the Coalface

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