09 August 2012
The purpose of this post is to give a brief introduction to creating, editing and submitting format signatures (or ‘magic’ entries) for the well-known File tool. The occasion for this was some work I did last week on improving File’s identification of the JPEG 2000 formats. I had some difficulty finding any easy-to-follow documentation that describes how to do this. The information is all out there, but it’s pretty fragmented. So, I wrote this brief tutorial, which is intended as an accessible introduction to magic editing. It only covers the very basics, but hopefully this is enough to overcome some initial stumbling blocks.
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format-identification
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magic
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unix-file
18 June 2012
Over the last few years, the EPUB format has gained widespread popularity in the consumer market. The KB has been approached by a number of publishers that wish to use EPUB for delivering some of their electronic publications. Surprisingly little information is available on the format’s suitability for archival preservation, apart from Library of Congress’ Sustainability of Digital Formats web pages, which contain entries on EPUB 2 and EPUB 3.
So, the KB’s Departments of Collection and Collection Care requested a more detailed investigation of EPUB’s preservation credentials. More specifically, answers were needed to the following questions:
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What are the main characteristics of EPUB?
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What functionality does EPUB provide, and is this sufficient for representing e.g. content with sophisticated layout and typography requirements?
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How well is the EPUB supported by software tools that are used in (pre-)ingest workflows?
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How suitable is EPUB for archival preservation? What are the main risks?
