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Why PDF sucks.
The Harvard Library developed FITS, the File Information Tool Set, as part of the ingest processing of its Digital Repository Service (DRS). This was mostly...
"TrID is an utility designed to identify file types from their binary signatures. While there are similar utilities with hard coded logic, TrID has no fixed rules. Instead, it's extensible and can be trained to recognize new formats in a fast and automatic way."
This is a guest post by Chris Adams, in the Repository Development Center, technical lead for the World Digital Library at the the Library of Congress. Like many people who work with digital imagery, I’ve been looking forward to the JPEG-2000 image format for a long time due to solid technical advantages: superior compression performance […]
The most important new feature of the recently released PDF/A-3 standard is that, unlike PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-1, it allows you to embed any file you...
PRONOM file-format guide. Searchable.
PDF Cabinet of Horrors: PDFs containing preservationally undesirable "features."
Analysis of 2.5 billion online files suggests software obsolescence slowing
It’s been a hectic few days since the flurry of posts last week about trying to access my ancient (1998!) PowerPoint 4.0 slides. I should have posted on the outcome much sooner, but Real Life…
Using FITS to gauge file fitness for preservation.
An action plan is an xml document which specifies how the format will be treated in the short-term and in the longer-term, and when the plan will be reviewed. These treatments might include "forward migration" - converting the format to a newer version of the same format, e.g. PDF 1.2 to PDF 2.0. Or they might include "normalization" - converting the format to a different format that may be easier to preserve, e.g. PDF 1.4 to PDF/A. In all cases, the file in its original format and version, will be archived in addition to any migrated or normalized file formats.
Competitor to FITS.
Data file containing tracking info on bad batch of Botox was in a file format too old to open. Software library to the rescue!
Is there such a thing as the perfect data format? No, of course not, but does anything come close? Yes. Trusty old comma-separated values, or CSV. CSV gets a lot of flak and I think it’s due a li...
Lately I’ve been trying to clarify in my mind exactly how certain common MPEG-related audio formats are defined. I think I’ve got this right, but if anyone can offer corrections, they&#…
The ISA Commons is a growing community that uses the ISA metadata tracking framework to facilitate standards-compliant collection, curation, management and reuse of datasets in an increasingly diverse set of life science domains.
PDF is a useful format. It’s an ISO standard. There’s reliable free software for reading it. It’s widely used and difficult to modify by accident. It can serve as a container for …