On 1st December Malcolm Todd of The National Archives gave a good account of the work he’s been doing on File Formats for Preservation, resulting in a substantial new Technology Watch report for the DPC. It was a seminar hosted by William Kilbride, with participants from the BBC, the BL, NLW and others. The afternoon was useful and interesting for me since I teach an elementary module on file formats in a preservation context for our DPTP courses.
My naïve thinking in the area has been characterised by the assumption that the process is rather static or linear, and that the problem we’re facing is broadly the same every time; migrate data from a format that’s about to become obsolete or unsupported, onto another format that’s stable, supported, and open. MS Word document to PDF or PDF/A…now that, I can understand!
In fact, I learned at least two ways of thinking about formats that hadn’t occurred to me before. One simple one is costs; some formats can cost more to preserve than others. This can be calculated in terms of storage costs, multiplied over time, and the costs associated with migrations to new versions of that format. Continue reading “File formats…or data streams?”