Friday, April 24, 2015

Format Migrations at Harvard Library: An NDSR Project Update

Format Migrations at Harvard Library: An NDSR Project Update. Joey Heinen. The Signal. April 17, 2015.
Digital material is just as susceptible to obsolescence as analog formats. There are different strategies that can be implemented, and they are developing a format migration framework for migration projects at Harvard. The viability of this framework will be tested by migrating three obsolete formats within the Digital Repository Service: Kodak PhotoCD, SMIL playlists and RealAudio. A first step is determine the stakeholders and responsible parties, since a digital preservation project cannot begin without knowing the stakeholders.

A diagram of the Migration Workflow shows each step of the process from gathering documentation for initial analysis to ingest of the migrated content into the repository. A Migration Pathway diagram shows how content will be transformed by a migration. They hope that analyzing the technical and infrastructural challenges of each format and putting this into a template that can be adapted will help the digital preservation field.

No comments: