Websites are increasing recognized as being culturally valuable. But there are concerns about the ability to preserve them because of current copyright requirements. The British Library over the past 6 years has archived over 6,000 culturally significant websites. Currently they must contact every copyright holders of these sites, and only have a 24% response rate. Some feel there is a "'digital black hole' in the nation's memory" because of the difficulty in archiving the web sites. There is a proposal to change the law to allow the copy deposit act to include websites. Some look at an opt out option. The BBC has a "no take-down" rule.
---
Canterbury Tales manuscript to be digitized. Medieval news. March 22, 2010.
The University of Manchester Library is planning to digitize the Canterbury Tales manuscript. This is part of a JISC funded project. The Centre of Digital Excellence supports universities, colleges, libraries and museums which lack the resources to digitize important works. In addition to the digitizing work, “they will also be exploring business models for the long term viability of digitisation.”
---
ISO Releases Archival Standards. eContent. Mar 23, 2010.
Two documents from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) aim to provide guidelines for archiving patient information. "Health informatics-Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records-Principles" and "Health informatics-Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records-Guidelines" look at topics of records maintenance, retention, disclosure, and eventual destruction. Electronic medical data must be stored for the life of the patient; there are legal, ethical, and privacy concerns.
---
Elsevier and PANGAEA Data Archive Linking Agreement. Neil Beagrie. Blog. 03 Mar 2010.
Elsevier and the data library PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data) have agreed to reciprocal linking of their content in earth system research. Research data sets deposited at PANGAEA are now automatically linked to the corresponding articles in Elsevier journals on ScienceDirect. Science is better supported through the cooperation and the flow of data into trusted archives. “This is the beginning of a new way of managing, preserving and sharing data from earth system research.”
---
Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive. Brian Stelter. The New York Times. March 14, 2010.
The International Amateur Scanning League plans to upload the National Archives’ collection of 3,000 DVDs in an “experiment in crowd-sourced digitization” using a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account. This is a small demonstration that volunteers can sometimes achieve what bureaucracies can’t or won’t. the DVDs are all technically available to the public, they are hard to see unless a person visits the archive or pays for a copy. The volunteers duplicate the DVDs then upload them to YouTube, the Internet Archive Web site and an independent server.
---
Uncompressed Audio File Formats. JISC Digital Media. 10 February 2010.
This looks at the main features of uncompressed audio file types, including WAV, AIFF and Broadcast WAV (BWF). “Uncompressed audio files are the most accurate digital representation of a soundwave” but they also take the most resources. Digital audio recording measures the level of a sound wave at regular intervals and records that value as a number. “This bitstream is the ‘raw’ audio data, expressing the sound wave in its closest digital analogue. “ These uncompressed audio file types are ‘wrapper’ formats that take the original data and combine it with additional data to make it compatible with other systems.
The most common is the Waveform Audio File Format (WAV), which is limited to a 4 Gb file size. The European Broadcasting Union created the Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) which is functionally identical to the WAV file except it has an extra header file for metadata. This is a recommended archive format and also has a 4 Gb file size. The European Broadcasting Union has recently added the Multichannel Broadcast Wave Format (MBWF)which combines the RF64 audio format (surround sound, MP3, AAC, etc) with a 64 bit address header and has a file size limit of 18 billion Gb. It is backwardly compatible with WAV and BWF. The Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is the native format for audio on Mac OSX.
“The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) recommend Broadcast WAV as a suitable archival format, for reasons of its wide compatibility and support, and its embedded metadata capability. For surround-sound or multichannel audio the MBWF format should be used. For archive PCM audio, bit depth should be a minimum of 24-bit, and sample rate a minimum of 48kHz to comply with IASA standards.” If compression is needed, lossless compression, which requires an additional encoding/decoding stage – codec) is the least destructive alternative. Some open-source lossless compression codecs are available, such as FLACC.
---
Court Orders Producing Party to "Unlock" PDF Since Not in a "Reasonably Usable" Form. Michael Arkfeld . Electronic Discovery and Evidence - blog. February 15, 2010.
In this contractual action, the defendants disclosed 11,757-page summary in a PDF "locked" format precluding the plaintiff from being able to edit and or manage the summary without retyping it. The Court found that the defendants' locked format made it "completely impractical for use" and ordered that the defendants "unlock" the files.
---
1 comment:
It is very important to standardize the patient's right to information of his electronic medical records. Medical billing companies are sure the first ones to touch these new guidelines of International Organization for Standardization, in archiving patient's information.
Post a Comment