The Things We Do #3 – Rebecca Chandler Enters The World of Collection Assessments

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For God’s Sake, Stop Digitizing Paper

We are all aware of the expectation from the general public that EverythingEver is digitized and available online already. This is of course frustrating because, 1) when presented with the reality there is often a negative reaction from the public, primarily that archives are lazy and behind the times, but also, 2) the perception is often trotted out as a reason why preservation efforts are frivolous or don’t need to be funded, especially if the citation is in reference to commercial assets that are widely torrented. “There are a million copies online,” the argument goes, “Why should we care about archives or pay attention to their uptight rules?”, little aware that the bulk of cultural material in existence does not consist of Hollywood films, studio albums, and published works (or student websites from 15 years ago).

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SAA AV Archives Night Wrap Up

Thanks to everyone who made the First 1st Annual AV Archives Night party a success, both the archives who contributed content (program is available here ) and all of you who came out in support of the great work these archives do to preserve the audiovisual record. It was a spectacular collection of audio and video from DC area archives (you haven’t lived if you haven’t seen 1930s color Kodachrome). And, collectively, we totally blew the minds of the Black Cat crew, which is saying something.

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What’s The Real Impact Of SHA-256?

There are a variety of algorithms that can be used for generating checksums, with two in particular – MD5 and SHA-256 – being the most common. The comparative benefits and drawbacks of both are well-understood: while MD5 is weaker against random and deliberate collisions, it is faster to generate than SHA-256. However, there are no published empirical estimates for the difference in time-to-generate between MD5 and SHA-256 in archival and repository environments, leading to difficulty in making an informed decision as to which algorithm to implement for preservation monitoring.

This white paper documents a comparative checksum test of the same files under the same conditions, leading to some surprising findings about the actual processing speeds of the two algorithms.

• CHECKSUM COMPARISON ARTICLE (PDF)
• MD5 AND SHA-256 TESTING SCRIPTS, AND RAW DATA (ZIP)

AVPreserve Crew at SAA 2014

AVPreserve consultants Josh Ranger, Bert Lyons, and Rebecca Chandler will be attending and participating in next week’s Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

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