Ed the Archivist

Senior Digital Archivist at Senate House Library, University of London

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

We're hiring...Repository and Open Access Manager at Senate House Library UOL. The role is managing, maintaining and promoting the University repository, and advocating for open access publishing.
https://t.co/GgegPrzn9e

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

When I say "original dates", more likely to be Windows NTFS metadata than actual file properties...since these are files moved / copied from Windows to a USB drive.

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

SharePoint Migration Tool is nifty for moving files if you want to keep original dates, but for some reason you can't train it to "remember" the directory you're working on. So we have to drill down through the folder tree time after time.

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

So now I solve my own problem - copy and paste the pathway from the Windows Explorer address bar. Inelegant workarounds are my specialty.

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

@kevingashley Also - this was a bootleg for years, but finally got an official release in 2014. The horse image is from Berlin Horse, an experimental film by Malcolm le Grice.

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

We're hiring...come and work in our friendly team at University of London as a Research Systems Engineer. Nice specialist role in Research Data Management for the Humanities...
https://t.co/Q9sAVrGQAc

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

@CHLThor @ForeverBren_x I'm sure you're right. My lament is more about SharePoint and how files on a web-based platform are so different...I would love to run DROID or Tika on a SharePoint collection. But I can't see how.

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

@CHLThor @ForeverBren_x My command line skills are very basic, but once I figured out how to do useful stuff with Windows folders, then SharePoint came along!
I suppose it is possible to do clever stuff in SP with PowerShell, but...

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

Recent exchange, for instance...
IT colleague: "How important are these file properties, anyhow?"
Me: "They're crucial. We envisage the future as being a huge re-encoding job, and we need to know the specs of each file."

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

To think I used to spend 3-5 days explaining what Digital Preservation was (as part of my DPTP course). Nowadays I have to convey it in five minutes or less!

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

Over 20K files were safely wrapped up in a nice .tgz file...I wonder who could have had the foresight to do that...

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

With help of IT colleagues, I have rescued this NDAD content from a server that was about to be turned off. It looks like a snapshot of the entire record-keeping system of this pioneering preservation project.
@kevingashley @PSleeman

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

@PSleeman I would start by defining a business case for your own organisation. Is there anyone in your place that wants to reuse Trello information? Can it be defined as a coporate record of some sort? What is the driver for archiving it?

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

@CHLThor I like the sound of this. It reminds me of appraisal-type tasks I used to do when accessioning paper records and paper archives. Not to say it's directly analogous to the digital world of course.

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

@CHLThor Good point, I'd forgotten about those external "rogues"...thinking Seinfeld and George Costanza, I would refer to this as "bringing in an outside banana".

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

@CHLThor I though preservation planning was about limiting the number of formats you're prepared to accept, thus making the "problem" more manageable.
However, I suspect this view is old-school now...

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

@CHLThor It's a poignant question! In the context of these slides, I kinda assumed "acceptable" refers rather to the Institution's ability to support a format...rather than anything intrinsic to the format itself.

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

"Every digital repository, Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) or Institutional Repository (IR) uses bibliographic description as an unrecognized design assumption." One of many highlights from this great article...

[Greg Wiedeman @GregWiedeman]

I wrote an article in Code4Lib about how current DAMS-style digital repositories don’t work with archival methods, which is not widely understood by admins and technologists. I https://t.co/mupuF3OlY6

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

If I can get these files into my non-existent digital archive, I’ll migrate them to Libre Office…keep the originals and the Libre migrations too. And that's the end of that chapter! END

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

Paging #digitalpreservation file format experts...I have some .DOC files from 1994 which refuse to be analysed by Apache Tika, EXIF Tool, or NZ MetadataExtractor. How can I view file header MD, esp. dates of creation, on these?

[Ed the Archivist @EdwardPinsent]

…none of which has done them much good. Amazingly, they continue to render in SharePoint, where a Modified date value continues to display. I believe this came from the NTFS file system, not properties of the .DOC. 5/6