Slide show on FITS progress

Last Friday’s CURATEcamp AVpres was a collaboration between several physical sites, using Google Hangout and IRC. I’d been asked if I could do a lightning presentation online on my work on FITS, but I had a commitment on the 19th, so Andrea Goethals at the Harvard Library said she’d do one.

That, unfortunately, was the day the Tsarnaev brothers went on their spree in Cambridge, and Harvard was closed for the day. Paul Wheatley picked up the job on short notice and did a presentation; the slide show is online. Paul suggested people should look at the work I’m putting on the Github repository after I’m finished at the end of April, but I wouldn’t mind if people tried it out now, while I’m still devoting my time to the project.

Digital preservation song

My daily update on the Files that Last blog includes a new song about digital preservation. It’s to promote my Kickstarter campaign for Files that Last and shares the book’s title, but you might find it fun in its own right. Naturally there’s a WAVE file in addition to the MP3. Links are appreciated.

JHOVE format notes

New on my business website: JHOVE format notes.

iPRES 2012

iPRES 2012 now has real information on its website.

State of HTML5 video

Long Tail Video has an interesting page on the state of HTML5 video. Their view is filtered through their own product, but it’s still a nice job of covering current trends.

A history of character encodings

Here’s a nice little history of character encodings, from ASCII through UTF-8.

It doesn’t really “date back to the earliest days of computers”; before ASCII there was a jumble of incompatible character encodings, some using as few as 5 bits. Even afterward, a bizarre IBM encoding called EBCDIC hung on for many years. But the path from ASCII to its descendants is fascinating enough by itself.

Thanks to Andy Jackson for the link.

PDF 1.7 and beyond

A paradox from Euan Cochrane: PDF 1.7 may follow the ISO standard, but not all PDF 1.7 files follow the same standard.

Conversations about data on CDL site

The California Digital Library has launched a new site, Data Pub, “to explore the landscape of digital data.” Suggested topics for discussion are data publication, data sharing, data archiving, data citation, open data, and open science.

Although the invitation to discussion is general, there doesn’t seem to be a way for non-CDL people to register so they can comment. This may be because they’re still getting things started.

Apache ODF toolkit

The Apache Software Foundation has made its first release of the ODF Toolkit. This version is called 0.5-incubating, so I imagine it still has rough edges. Officially, “incubating” means that “the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.”

This could be useful to software that validates or extracts metadata from Open Document Format files. It includes ODFDOM 0.8.7, which has been around for about a year. Anyone want to write a module for JHOVE or JHOVE2?

PDF/A post on FTL

Today on Files That Last I have a post on “PDF/A for the long haul.” It’s directed at the end user or administrator, not at the formats geek or preservation specialist, but might be useful to link to when you’re explaining what PDF/A is good for.