Research data is different

Research data is different. Simon Wilson. Digital Archiving blog. 5 August 2016.
     A blog post about some born digital archives at Hull.  It is not academic research data but instead comes from a variety of sources. By using DROID to look at 270,867 accessioned files they discovered the following:

• 97.96% of files were identified by DROID 
• There were 228 different format types were identified 
• The most common format is fmt/40 (MS Word 97-2003) with 120,595 files (44.5%).  
•   The top formats they found were:

    Microsoft Word Document (97-2003)                 44.52%
    Microsoft Word for Windows (2007 and later)     5.63%
    Microsoft Excel 97 Workbook                              5.08%
    Graphics Interchange Format                              4.15%
    Acrobat PDF 1.4 - Portable Document Format     3.12%
    JPEG File Interchange Format (1.01)                    2.72%
    Microsoft Word Document (6.0 / 95)                    2.46%
    Acrobat PDF 1.3 - Portable Document Format     2.39%
    JPEG File Interchange Format (1.02)                    1.83%
    Hypertext Markup Language (v4)                         1.67%

 The number of and type of formats they found in their collections was different from other institutions that had research data.  An important step is to then look at the identified file formats and determine a strategy to migrate that format. Knowing the number and frequency of the formats in the collections will allow efforts to be prioritized.

Digital Preservation Matters.