Fixity, the property of a digital file or object being fixed or unchanged, is a cornerstone of digital preservation. Fixity information, from simple file counts or file size values to more precise checksums and cryptographic hashes, is data used to verify whether an object has been altered or degraded. Many in the preservation community know …
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council, National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group co-chair and a former Fellow in the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. Here on The Signal, members of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation team have been providing some …
This blog post is co-authored by Carl Fleischhauer, Project Manager, Digital Initiatives, Library of Congress. People who manage audio and video files over time, do create fixity data, aka hash values or checksums, to help monitor the condition of those files in storage and when moved from one system or media to another system or …
How do I know if a digital file/object has been corrupted, changed or altered? Further how can I prove that I know what I have? How can I be confident that the content I am providing is in good condition, complete, or reasonably complete? How do I verify that a file/object has not changed over …
The following is a guest post from John Spencer, President BMS Chace, and coordinating committee member for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. In this post, Spencer shares information he presented on a National Digital Stewardship Alliance panel on the importance of understanding bit level threats to preserving digital content (PDF) at the 2012 NDIIPP Digital …
Kent Anderson offers a provocative post in The Mirage of Fixity — Selling an Idea Before Understanding the Concept. Anderson takes Nicholas Carr to task for an article in the Wall Street Journal bemoaning the death of textual fixity. Here’s a quote from Carr: Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change …
The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Fellow at the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. A vexing property of digital objects is the difficulties they pose to ensuring their ongoing authenticity and stability. Files can become corrupted by use, bits can rot even when unused, and during transfer the parts essential …
The digital preservation landscape is ever-evolving, and the Library of Congress has recently made a significant update to its Recommended Formats Statement (RFS), to upgrade FFV1 (version 3) in Matroska (.mkv) container from an "Acceptable Format" to one of five "Preferred Formats" for the preservation and long-term access of video materials, reflecting its ongoing commitment to staying at the forefront of audiovisual preservation.
Today’s guest post is from Kate Murray, Digital Projects Coordinator in Digital Collections Management and Services at the Library of Congress and Bertram Lyons, Partner at AVP. FADGI (Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative) is pleased to announce a new release of its free open source application embARC with support for FFV1 encoding. embARC, short for …
