DPN + AVP Collaboration wins 2017 NDSA Innovation Award

25 October 2017

We received some wonderful news today: it was announced at the opening plenary of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Digital Preservation conference in Pittsburgh, PA that the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) received the 2017 NDSA Innovation Award in the organization category, in particular for the Digital Preservation Workflow Curriculum that we collaborated on with them! The Innovation Awards were established by the NDSA “to recognize and encourage innovation in the field of digital preservation stewardship. These awards highlight and commend creative individuals, projects, organizations, and future stewards demonstrating originality and excellence in their contributions to the field of digital preservation.” We are truly honored and humbled by this recognition!

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Newsletter – Past Issues

24 October 2017

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Bert Lyons on “Lost in the Stacks”

12 October 2017

Listen to Episode 298 of Lost in the Stacks, featuring an interview with AVP’s Senior Consultant Bert Lyons talking about Exactly.

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Library Of Congress AFC Github Repository

12 October 2017

AVPreserve worked with the Library of Congress American Folklife Collection on processing a series of digital archival collections to: generate access and preservation metadata; map metadata to LOC schemas; batch restructure, rename and bag files to conform to LOC standards; extract metadata from digital files, and generate derivatives.

The resulting processing tools are available on our GitHub account:

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Harvard Digital Preservation Format Assessments

12 October 2017

Harvard Library collections include:

  • a variety of computer media that will be imaged using forensic disk imaging techniques,
  • image sequences, a format used primarily in motion picture film scanning, and
  • video assets in a variety of formats.

These materials will be preserved in the Library’s preservation and access repository – the Digital Repository Service (DRS). As a first step towards providing support for this material in the DRS, the Library engaged AVPreserve in late 2015 to assist with the analysis. The goals of the analysis were:

  • Recommended formats to accept and prefer for the DRS
  • Recommended technical metadata schema(s) to use for these formats
  • DRS content models for these objects
  • Recommendations for enhancing Harvard Library’s FITS tool to better support these objects

The driving principles of this work were to:

  • Provide interoperability with the existing metadata schemas and workflows of the DRS
  • Provide sufficient metadata for long-term preservation of these objects
  • Adhere to existing standards where possible
  • Propose simpler models over more complex ones where possible

Specifically the analysis was conducted in three areas: formats, metadata and tools. See assessment results on the Harvard Wiki page:

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A Study of Embedded Metadata Support in Audio Recording Software

1 October 2017

This report presents the findings of an ARSC Technical Committee study, coordinated and authored by AVPS, which evaluates support for embedded metadata within and across a variety of audio recording software applications. This work addresses two primary questions: (1) How well does embedded metadata persist, and is its integrity maintained, as it is handled by various applications, and (2) How well is embedded metadata handled during the process of creating a derivative? The report concludes that persistence and integrity issues are prevalent across the audio software applications studied. In addition to the report, test methods and reference files are provided for download, enabling the reader to perform metadata integrity testing.

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