Tag Archives: file formats

Scanning is different from digitisation

If you haven’t seen it, can I recommend Kristen Snawder’s recent post on the Library of Congress Digital Preservation blog, Digitization is different than digital preservation. Kristen reiterates familiar points about the long-term commitment necessary for serious digital preservation, contrasted with the quick hit of a scanning project. “In the hurry to meet user expectations, [...]

File formats…or data streams?

On 1st December Malcolm Todd of The National Archives gave a good account of the work he’s been doing on File Formats for Preservation, resulting in a substantial new Technology Watch report for the DPC. It was a seminar hosted by William Kilbride, with participants from the BBC, the BL, NLW and others. The afternoon [...]

DCC discussions on image formats

Rich pickings in a couple of fascinating posts on the DCC Digital Curation Blog, in which Chris Rusbridge summarises recent discussions on the DCC-Associates email list about appropriate photo image file formats for preservation, specifically TIFF, RAW and JPEG 2000. A sibling post also discusses the merits of RAW versus TIFF from the perspective of [...]

KB file format guides

I was pleased the DCC news feed alerted me to a new publication by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Alternative File Formats for Storing Master Images of Digitisation Projects. Particularly as on the KB publications page are also links to two other recent reports Evaluating File Formats for Long-term Preservation and Recommendations for the creation of PDF [...]

The MS Office 2003 format debacle

The consternation that has been caused by Office 2003 Service Pack 3 has provoked a great deal of discussion amongst the electronic records community about the vulnerability of proprietary file formats. (It’s provoked a lot of other discussion as well, much of it not complimentary to Microsoft.) If you’re not familiar with the problem, it [...]