How do you start preserving digital objects if your institution or organisation has little or no capacity to do so? Digital preservation can at first be bit-part and modular. You can build your capacity one step at a time. Once you’ve taken a few steps you can then put them together, making a ‘system’. It’s… Continue reading Pre-Figurative Digital Preservation
Tag: information management
British Stand Up Comedy Archive’s audiovisual collections
Greatbear have recently worked with the British Stand Up Comedy Archive (BSUCA) to reformat a number of Digital Audio Tapes (DATs) and U-Matic video tapes from their collection. Established in 2013 and based at the University of Kent’s Special Collections, the BSUCA aims ‘to celebrate, preserve, and provide access to the archives and records of… Continue reading British Stand Up Comedy Archive’s audiovisual collections
Codecs and Wrappers for Digital Video
In the last Greatbear article we quoted sage advice from the International Association of Audiovisual Archivists: ‘Optimal preservation measures are always a compromise between many, often conflicting parameters.’ [1] While this statement is true in general for many different multi-format collections, the issue of compromise and conflicting parameters becomes especially apparent with the preservation of… Continue reading Codecs and Wrappers for Digital Video
Digitising small audiovisual collections: making decisions and taking action
Deciding when to digitise your magnetic tape collections can be daunting. The Presto Centre, an advocacy organisation working to help ‘keep audiovisual content alive,’ have a graphic on their website which asks: ‘how digital are our members?’ They chart the different stages of ‘uncertainty,’ ‘awakening’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘wisdom’ and ‘certainty’ that organisations move through as they… Continue reading Digitising small audiovisual collections: making decisions and taking action
World Day for Audiovisual Heritage – digitisation and digital preservation policy and research
Today, October 27, has been declared World Day for Audiovisual Heritage by UNESCO. We also blogged about it last year. Since 2005, UNESCO have used the landmark to highlight the importance of audiovisual archives to ‘our common heritage’ which contain ‘the primary records of the 20th and 21st centuries.’ Increasingly, however, the day is used to highlight how audio… Continue reading World Day for Audiovisual Heritage – digitisation and digital preservation policy and research
D-1, D-2 & D-3: histories of digital video tape
At Greatbear we carefully restore and transfer D-1, D-2, D-3, D-5, D-9 and Digital-S tapes to digital file at archival quality. Early digital video tape development Behind every tape (and every tape format) lie interesting stories, and the technological wizardry and international diplomacy that helped shape the roots of our digital audio visual world are… Continue reading D-1, D-2 & D-3: histories of digital video tape
Videokunstarkivet – Norway’s Digital Video Art Archive
We have recently digitised a U-matic video tape of eclectic Norwegian video art from the 1980s. The tape documents a performance by Kjartan Slettemark, an influential Norwegian/ Swedish artist who died in 2008. The tape is the ‘final mix’ of a video performance entitled Chromakey Identity Blue in which Slettemark live mixed several video sources onto… Continue reading Videokunstarkivet – Norway’s Digital Video Art Archive
Capitalising on the archival market: SONY’s 185 TB tape cartridge
In Trevor Owen’s excellent blog post ‘What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers’, he outlines the different ways ‘archive’ is used to describe data sets and information management practices in contemporary society. While the article shows it is important to distinguish between tape archives, archives as records management, personal papers… Continue reading Capitalising on the archival market: SONY’s 185 TB tape cartridge
Significant properties – technical challenges for digital preservation
A consistent focus of our blog is the technical and theoretical issues that emerge in the world of digital preservation. For example, we have explored the challenges archivists face when they have to appraise collections in order to select what materials are kept, and what are thrown away. Such complex questions take on specific dimensions… Continue reading Significant properties – technical challenges for digital preservation
Digital preservation – a selection of online resources
Update 2020: We are updating and maintaining this list of useful web links in the Resources section of our website here: Digital and Audiovisual Preservation – Online Resources If you are new to the world of digital preservation, you may be feeling overwhelmed by the multitude of technical terms and professional practices to contend with,… Continue reading Digital preservation – a selection of online resources
‘Missing Believed Wiped’: The Search For Lost TV Treasures
Contemporary culture is often presented as drowning in mindless nostalgia, with everything that has ever been recorded circulating in a deluge of digital information. Whole subcultures have emerged in this memory boom, as digital technologies enable people to come together via a shared passion for saving obscurities presumed to be lost forever. One such organisation… Continue reading ‘Missing Believed Wiped’: The Search For Lost TV Treasures
Software Across Borders? The European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation (E-Ark) Project
The latest big news from the digital preservation world is that the European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation – (E-Ark), a three year, multinational research project, has received a £6M award from the European Commission ‘to create a revolutionary method of archiving data, addressing the problems caused by the lack of coherence and interoperability between the… Continue reading Software Across Borders? The European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation (E-Ark) Project
Open Source Solutions for Digital Preservation
In a technological world that is rapidly changing how can digital information remain accessible? One answer to this question lies in the use of open source technologies. As a digital preservation strategy it makes little sense to use codecs owned by Mac or Windows to save data in the long term. Propriety software essentially operate… Continue reading Open Source Solutions for Digital Preservation
Digital Optical Technology System – ‘A non-magnetic, 100 year, green solution for data storage.’
‘A non-magnetic, 100 year, green solution for data storage.’ This is the stuff of digital information managers’ dreams. No more worrying about active data management, file obsolescence or that escalating energy bill. Imagine how simple life would be if there was a way to store digital information that could last, without intervention, for nearly 100… Continue reading Digital Optical Technology System – ‘A non-magnetic, 100 year, green solution for data storage.’
Digital Preservation – Establishing Standards and Challenges for 2014
2014 will no doubt present a year of new challenges for those involved in digital preservation. A key issue remains the sustainability of digitisation practices within a world yet to establish firm standards and guidelines. Creating lasting procedures capable of working across varied and international institutions would bring some much needed stability to a profession often characterized… Continue reading Digital Preservation – Establishing Standards and Challenges for 2014
End of year thank yous to our customers
What a year it has been in the life of Greatbear Analogue and Digital Media. As always the material customers have sent us to digitise has been fascinating and diverse, both in terms of the recordings themselves and the technical challenges presented in the transfer process. At the end of a busy year we want to… Continue reading End of year thank yous to our customers
Big Data, Long Term Digital Information Management Strategies & the Future of (Cartridge) Tape
What is the most effective way to store and manage digital data in the long term? This is a question we have given considerable attention to on this blog. We have covered issues such as analogue obsolescence, digital sustainability and digital preservation policies. It seems that as a question it remains unanswered and up for serious… Continue reading Big Data, Long Term Digital Information Management Strategies & the Future of (Cartridge) Tape
Parsimonious Preservation – (another) different approach to digital information management
We have been featuring various theories about digital information management on this blog in order to highlight some of the debates involved in this complex and evolving field. To offer a different perspective to those that we have focused on so far, take a moment to consider the principles of Parsimonious Preservation that has been… Continue reading Parsimonious Preservation – (another) different approach to digital information management
A word about metadata and digital collections
Metadata is data about data. Maybe that sounds pretty boring, but archivists love it, and it is really important for digitisation work. As mentioned in the previous post that focused on the British Library’s digital preservation strategies, as well as many other features on this blog, it is fairly easy to change a digital file without… Continue reading A word about metadata and digital collections
Digitisation strategies – back up, bit rot, decay and long term preservation
In a blog post a few weeks ago we reflected on several practical and ethical questions emerging from our digitisation work. To explore these issues further we decided to take an in-depth look at the British Library’s Digital Preservation Strategy 2013-2016 that was launched in March 2013. The British Library is an interesting case study because they were… Continue reading Digitisation strategies – back up, bit rot, decay and long term preservation
Measuring signals – challenges for the digitisation of sound and video
In a 2012 report entitled ‘Preserving Sound and Moving Pictures’ for the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Technology Watch Report series, Richard Wright outlines the unique challenges involved in digitising audio and audiovisual material. ‘Preserving the quality of the digitized signal’ across a range of migration processes that can negotiate ‘cycles of lossy encoding, decoding and reformatting… Continue reading Measuring signals – challenges for the digitisation of sound and video
Curating Digital Information or What Do You With Your Archive?
Today is the first day of iPres 2013, the 10th international conference on the preservation of digital objects held in Lisbon, Portugal. To mark the occasion we want to reflect on an issue that is increasingly important for the long term management of digital data: curation. Anyone who has lived through the digital transition in… Continue reading Curating Digital Information or What Do You With Your Archive?
C-120 Audio Cassette Transfer – the importance of high quality formats
In archiving, the simple truth is formats matter. If you want the best quality recording, that not only sounds good but has a strong chance of surviving over time, it needs to be recorded on an appropriate format. Most of us, however, do not have specialised knowledge of recording technologies and use what is immediately… Continue reading C-120 Audio Cassette Transfer – the importance of high quality formats
Digital Preservation – Planning for the Long Term
There are plenty of reflections on the Great Bear tape blog about the fragility of digital data, and the need to think about digitisation as part of a wider process of data migration your information will need to make in its lifetime. We have also explored how fast moving technological change can sometimes compromise our… Continue reading Digital Preservation – Planning for the Long Term
Archiving for the digital long term: information management and migration
As an archival process digitisation offers the promise of a dream: improved accessibility, preservation and storage. However the digital age is not without its archival headaches. News of the BBC’s plans to abandon their Digital Media Initiative (DMI), which aimed to make the BBC media archive ‘tapeless’, clearly demonstrates this. As reported in The Guardian:… Continue reading Archiving for the digital long term: information management and migration