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New Cloud Storage Vendor Profile – DuraCloud
10 July 2014
AVPreserve has released the fifth in the series of Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles compiled by Consultant Seth Anderson. These profiles assess cloud storage services in relation to archival and preservation concerns, looking at issues of data management, reporting, redundancy, accessibility, security, end of service protocols, and adherence to the NDSA’s Levels of Preservation for digital collections.
Fixity Tutorial Now Available
9 July 2014
This week AVPreserve released version 0.4 of Fixity, our free file monitoring tool. Fixity allows users to schedule regular scans of folders or whole directories to check both file integrity against stored checksums and file attendance against filesystem locations (i.e., have files been added, moved, or gone missing). After a scheduled run a report is emailed to the user, detailing any discrepancies or changes that then allow the user to assess or resolve any potential issues.
Fixity And Filesystems: Enhanced System Monitoring Via Inodes
7 July 2014
The latest technical brief from Digital & Metadata Preservation Specialist Alex Duryee explores the use of inodes in the functionality of Fixity, our free digital preservation file monitoring tool. Fixity offers the unique capability of tracking file attendance as well as file integrity.
In this free download, learn how we used filesystem structure to achieve that and how tracking files through their inode makes for a more powerful, more flexible monitoring approach.
Fixity and Filesystems: Enhanced System Monitoring via inodes
7 July 2014
A PDF version of this article is available here.
If you have explored our checksum tool, Fixity, you may have noticed that it tracks a third value alongside the expected filepath and checksum value of files. This value is the file’s index location, which is crucial to the operation of the filesystem. On OSX and Linux, the index value is called the inode of a file; on Windows, it is the file identifier.
New Cloud Vendor Profile
24 June 2014
AVPreserve has released the fourth in the series of Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles compiled by Consultant Seth Anderson. These profiles assess cloud storage services in relation to archival and preservation concerns, looking at issues of data management, reporting, redundancy, accessibility, security, end of service protocols, and adherence to the NDSA’s Levels of Preservation for digital collections.
AVPreserve at International Seminar of Sound and Audiovisual Archives
23 June 2014
AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak has been invited to speak at the Sixth International Seminar of Sound and Audiovisual Archives in Mexico City, Mexico. Themed “The Democratization of Sound and Audiovisual Heritage in the Digital Age”, this year’s seminar is organized by the National Sound Recordings Library of Mexico as part of the Cooperation Program of the Latin American Summits: “Sound and Audiovisual IBERMEMORIA”, proposed by Mexico and the Latin American General Secretariat (SEGIB). The seminar promotes the conservation, use, and re-use of sound and audiovisual heritage in Latin America under the Cooperation Program’s efforts to establish a model for the integral conservation of sound, audiovisual, and filmic documents that make up the heritage of the countries of the region.
AVPreserve Sponsoring AV Archives Night Party
12 June 2014
AV Archives Night || Ensuring Access @ SAA 2014
Episode 10 of More Podcast, Less Process Now Available
9 June 2014
Episode #10 of “More Podcast, Less Process”, the archives podcast co-produced by METRO and AVPreserve, is now available for streaming and download. This episode is “Archival Manoeuvres: Managing Digitization Projects” with guests Miwa Yokoyama (Digital Project Manager, Carnegie Hall) and Mitch Brodsky (Digital Archives Manager, New York Philharmonic). Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic are both in the midst of large scale digitization projects involving their historic institutional collections, primed towards increasing researcher access to the materials and making the content more broadly usable by the entire organization. Miwa and Mitch talk about the differences and similarities between their respective projects (in-house v. outsourcing, scope of collections, access points), and provide a helpful breakdown of the challenges, successes, and pro-tips they have encountered. Josh and Jefferson had a lively discussion with our guests, and tried to keep the westside/eastside trash-talking to a minimum.
Two Open-Source Tools For Digital Asset Metadata Management
2 June 2014
In today’s world of digital information, previously disparate archival practices are converging around the need to manage collections at the item level. Media collections require a curatorial approach that demand archivists know certain information about every single object in their care for purposes of provenance, quality control, and appraisal. This is a daunting task for archives, as it asks that they retool or redesign migration and accession workflows. It is exactly in gaps such as these that practical technologies become ever useful.
This article offers case studies regarding two freely-available, open-source digital asset metadata tools—BWF MetaEdit and MDQC. The case studies offer on-the-ground examples of how four institutions recognized a need for metadata creation and validation, and how they employed these new tools in their production and accessioning workflows. By Alex Duryee and Bertram Lyons. This article originally appeared in the Practical Technology for Archives Journal, Issue 2, June 2014.
MDQC 0.2 Released
2 June 2014
Version 0.2 of MDQC has been released for free download. MDQC is a desktop application that reads the embedded metadata of a file or a directory and compares it against a set of rules defined by the user, verifying that the technical and administrative specs of the files are correct. This automates and minimizes the time needed to QC large batches of digitized assets, increasing the efficiency of managing digitization projects. Updates to Version 2.0:
