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RESEARCH-DATAMAN  June 2017

RESEARCH-DATAMAN June 2017

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Subject:

Fwd: DPTP: What’s the magic number? The identification, characterisation, and validation of File Formats – London, Senate House, 18 July 2017

From:

Kevin Ashley <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Research Data Management discussion list <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 16:25:06 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (174 lines)

Forwarded on behalf of Stephanie Taylor of the organisation formerly known as
ULCC. Replies to her, please <[log in to unmask]>

Hi,

I thought the following might be of interest to members of this list.

Best wishes,

Stephanie

Course Overview

If you have a digital preservation strategy that involves digital files, you’ll 
know how important it is to understand the file formats in which your data is 
encoded. To do this comprehensively involves at least three main operations: 
identifying the format, characterising the format, and validating the format. To 
put it another way, you’re asking three important questions: what is it, what 
properties does it have, and how is it going to behave? Is the file in front of 
you really a PDF, or not?

This course will demonstrate some of the tools that are available for carrying 
out these actions, show you the outputs, and help you in interpreting what they 
mean and why they are important for long-term preservation – particularly for 
any future migration operations.

While you may think technical metadata and file format signatures are a bit out 
of your line, we make them easy to grasp, and at the end of the course you will 
see how they apply to your collections and your content, and how they impact 
directly on the meaning and authenticity of your digital objects. You are not 
expected to do any command line actions on this course, but you will see how 
easy it is to do, and feel empowered to “try them at home”.

This course is a detailed examination of some of the operations that are likely 
to take place in a standard Ingest routine. As such, the course is part of a 
projected series of learning offerings that, taken together, will help you 
understand the process of Archival Information Package (AIP) assembly. Since 
these processes can often be automated in a preservation system, it is useful to 
see them at work and expose their mechanisms, to better understand the 
operations and their consequences.



Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

·    Understand the difference between identification, characterisation and 
validation of file formats

·    Gain awareness of the tools that can be used for helping with these 
discrete operations

·    See these tools in action, via screencasts. The tools include Siegfried, 
DROID, FITS, JHOVE, and VeraPDF

·    Have a chance to examine the outputs of the tools in some detail, seeing 
technical metadata from files and learning what it means

·    Be equipped to interpret the outputs of the tools

·    Learn the meaning of mime types, extensions, signatures and pattern 
matching (the “magic numbers”)

·    Gain a basic understanding of extensible markup language (XML)

·    Learn about the flavours of the PDF/A format

·    Understand how to act on the results of identification, characterisation 
and validation

·    Understand the limitations of the tools, and why they sometimes fail

·    Be equipped to begin or enhance a strategy for dealing with file formats, 
as part of your digital preservation plan



Course Tutor

Ed Pinsent wrote the recent iterations of the Digital Preservation Training 
Programme, building on the work of Kevin Ashley, Jen Mitcham, William Kilbride, 
Patricia Sleeman and others. Ed is a senior archivist based within the Digital 
Preservation Team at CoSector, and has been involved in all aspects of digital 
preservation since 2004. He has a traditional archivist and records manager 
background, and brings to his teaching a wide range of skills and experience 
from numerous digital preservation projects.



Who should attend?

·    Digital Librarians

·    Information Technology managers

·    Archivists

·    Records managers

·    Repository managers

·    Curators

·    Collection managers

·    Information management professionals



What Previous Attendees Thought:



“I can see the application of these [significant properties] in my organisation. 
Good exercise to get people talking.”

“Helpful for peers to present the tools in non-complicated language.”

“Practical exercise, talking things through and participating – all excellent 
for learning.”

“A great way of getting you to think through and apply the theory.”

“Lots of information, but presented in a clear format.”

“I enjoyed the participatory nature of this and learned about tools I had not 
heard about before.”

“Interesting [tools] exercise – good set of skills learned here.”

“The knowledge of several file format…was very crucial for me in this course. It 
definitely increased my bank of knowledge.”

“File formats [was] a really useful module for our particular situation. Has 
given me confidence to engage better with IT colleagues.”

“Very clear explanation of the different tools.”



Next Steps

Date:                18 July 2017

Venue:             The course will be held at Senate House, conveniently located 
in the heart of Bloomsbury, next to the British Museum and Russell Square.

Costs:               £300.00

Booking and more information about the course:       http://bit.ly/2sY8NbD

More information about our consultancy services and other courses on the Digital 
Preservation Training Programme (DPTP): 
http://www.cosector.com/digital-preservation/

For enquiries about the course content, please email – [log in to unmask]

For enquiries about bookings and payment please email – [log in to unmask]





Stephanie Taylor
Senior Consultant
Digital Preservation Team
Cosector, University of London

Senate House
South Block
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

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