andrew @andrewjbtw@digipres.club

Not sure what I expected a computer-generated animation film from 1971 entitled "Metadata" to be about but it probably wasn't this https://www.nfb.ca/film/metadata_en/

I got pulled into doing something in May that gives me an excuse to look at these GeoCities and related website archives https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102784973

I started reading Delete today and the opening anecdote is about someone being treated negatively because of a photo posted to MySpace, and the point of the story is that remembering is now the default on the internet, so.

Maybe this is digital preservation heresy, buy I was excited to learn that Archivematica now allows you to turn off file format identification entirely.

Digital Preservation Specialist (short-term)

"I put a poster on a building's wall a few years ago and then they tore down the building and built a new one without saving my poster" and other digital preservation questions

If you're on a call using a device with a headphone jack and you need to up the volume to hear in a semi-open office cubicle environment, please [whispers quietly] use headphones.

Especially if you appear to be getting helpdesk support on a system that sounds like maybe it's for where your kid is applying to/attending college?

This is an area of work I'd like to get into, if I were to change career directions, but it's really hard for me to imagine going to school again, what with the 8-9 years of grad school I've already done (depending on how you count years). There's probably paths in that don't require a full-fledged additional degree.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/technology/universities-public-interest-technology.html

In not entirely unrelated news, a while back I scanned the whole run of the University of California Division of Library Automation's Bulletin but am not sure about whether to put it online. I guess I could contact UC.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/dla-bulletin/oclc/6743658

DLA later become CDL. I scanned it because my dad worked there from the 1970s to the early 2000s and mentioned some articles in it to me, the actual page count isn't that large, and the scanners at Berkeley's library are easy for anyone to use.

As someone who works at an institution that collects (some) collectors' collections of (computer-related) things that a lot of people dismissed as not worth collecting, I'm not unsympathetic to the mostly not-really-hoarders-in-a-clinical-sense described here:

https://gizmodo.com/delete-never-the-digital-hoarders-who-collect-tumblrs-1832900423

But I'd like to have seen some asking of the question: "What comes after?" Collections that go to museums or archives often do so when the collector can no longer maintain them. Not everything will go to IA.

TFW you sign up for a working group, no one else is west of Central time, and meetings start at 7 Pacific.

Thinking about signing up for this blockchain course https://www.canvas.net/browse/sjsu/courses/blockchain-decentralization because I'm interested in the artifacts these systems create and leave behind.

"To start, due to the influence of computing pioneer Allen Kay and a desire to deal with the problem of digital preservation, the original Sophie was written in Smalltalk"

https://doi.org/10.29173/iq926

(Sophie 1.0 was developed in the 2000s, btw.)

Incredibly, the issue is the headphone jack on the first computer I used to play the files. When plugged in all the way, you can't hear the audio on the two files that don't appear to work. You can hear the audio on other files, but that seems to be because the audio channel layout is different on them. When I pull the plug just slightly, the inaudible files become audible and the other files sound better but not a lot louder.

<irony>One of the tapes is a talk that starts out on the topic of computer compatibility</irony>

Update: must be a codec issue. Audio is ok on Windows but not Linux (no Mac available at the moment).

Just when you think you've got a reasonably consistent DV tapes, you find two that play fine audio on analog out, but faint audio when captured over Firewire.

This set up can also handle HDV/"M2T" files but I don't think there's a DV analzyer equivalent for that, so you don't get cool QC charts.

There's probably other things I'm missing that more of a specialist would catch, but without being able to devote a position to keep closer watch on DV, this mostly-in-the-background workflow is the only real path towards transferring 1500+ tapes. Put in a tape, enter some metadata, come back later and tape will be read, rewound, analyzed, and ready for QC.