Dutch electro outfit the Digital Dark Age Crew are one of the forgotten legends that used to be a mainstay of Rotterdam’s late 90s to mid-2000s underground electro scene. Their music was characterised by relentless electro beats, sparse synth lines, and lyrics that typically commented on the fragility and transience of digital media and digital information in general. In a twisted turn of events, this very theme would eventually define the Digital Dark Age Crew’s own history, ultimately leading to the group’s dramatic demise in 2007. After a fifteen year absence, the Digital Dark Age Crew have now made a long overdue comeback with their new track “Wheel Out the Digital Dark Age Klaxon”, which was released today on the occasion of World Digital Preservation Day 2022. Time to take a look back at the history of the Digital Dark Age Crew, and their continued relevance today!
This blog post covers some techniques that can be used to identify storage media and storage devices using Python and the Windows API. This can be useful for distinguishing between different types of portable storage media, such as floppy disks and USB thumb drives. It also presents a demo script that integrates these techniques.
It’s been a while since the last release of the Isolyzer tool, but after four years of near-inactivity I just published Isolyzer 1.4. In this post I provide some background information on how this release came about, and I briefly explain the main changes.
Intensive Breeding by Jean Marc Cote, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
At the KB we’ve been using JP2 (JPEG 2000 Part 1) as our primary image format for digitised newspapers, books and periodicals since 2007. The digitisation work is contracted out to external vendors, who supply the digitised pages as losslessly compressed preservation masters, as well as lossily compressed access images that are used within the Delpher platform.
Right now the KB is in the process of migrating its digital collections to a new preservation system. This prompted the question whether it would be feasible to generate access JP2s from the preservation masters in-house at some point in the future, using software that runs inside the preservation system1. As a first step towards answering that question, I created some simple proof of concept workflows, using three different JPEG 2000 codecs. I then tested these workflows with preservation master images from our collection. The main objective of this work was to find a workflow that both meets our current digitisation requirements, and is also sufficiently performant.
Earlier this month saw the publication of The Significant Properties of Spreadsheets. This is the final report of a six-year research effort by the Open Preservation Foundation’s Archives Interest Group (AIG), which is composed of participants from the National Archives of the Netherlands (NANETH), the National Archives of Estonia (NAE), the Danish National Archives (DNA), and Preservica. The report caught my attention for two reasons. First, there’s the subject matter of spreadsheets, on which I’ve written a few posts in the past1. Second, it marks a surprising (at least to me!) return of “significant properties”, a concept that was omnipresent in the digital preservation world between, roughly, 2005 and 2010, but which has largely fallen into disuse since then. In this post I’m sharing some of my thoughts on the report.
