The UK Digital Preservation Programme, is a JISC funded project led by the National Archives that pools the expertise of several organisations to prevent a potential “digital dark age”, which would result if billions of documents in old formats were to become unreadable by future technology.

Microsoft is one such partner that has joined forces with the UK’s National Archives to help ensure the preservation of the UK’s digital records. As the UK government’s official archive, the National Archives contains 900 years of the nation’s history. Traditionally, these records were produced and stored on paper and physical preservation was relatively straightforward.

But the exponential growth of digital information has created new preservation challenges in that applications supporting older file formats are no longer commercially available in some instances.

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.

Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of “losing years of critical knowledge” because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats.

The project will enable staff and visitors at the National Archives to view historical information based on legacy formats in the way the author intended. In addition, the National Archives will be able to improve the accessibility of these documents by converting the information to new open file formats.

“Microsoft took the step to implement XML-based file formats that unlock data in documents, allowing them to be archived, restructured, aggregated and reused in new and dynamic ways,” explained Gordon Frazer, UK managing director and vice president of Microsoft International.

Read the full article here.

On Friday 13th April after five hours travelling by train David, Iain and Graeme of Spoken Word arrived in Hull for the first meeting of the REMAP project.

The REMAP project is based at the University of Hull and its’ aim is to ‘investigate the use of a digital repository to support the embedding of records management and digital preservation within the context of a UK Higher Education institution’.

REMAP is a follow on from the RepoMMan Project which stands for the Repository Metadata and Management project. Repoman aimed to develop a tool that would interact with a Fedora based repository system.

The project has been funded by JISC under the latest JISC capital programme. The capital programme is additional funding from JISC of £81 million over three years to enhance the network infrastructure (SuperJANET 5), to digitise key resources for the academic community, and to support the development of e-learning; e-infrastructure; virtual research environments; users and innovation; and repositories and preservation.

The REMAP project is being led by ESIG (e-Services Integration Group) at the University of Hull. ESIG are also a part of our recently started EDINA led VSM portal project.

Although tired form the long journey David, Iain and Graeme definitely found Hull to have been a rewarding experience.

Photo Courtesy of: Helen K.

On 13th March 2007 David and Iain of the Spoken Word joined David Jordan from the BBC’s ‘Future Media and Technology’ department at the JISC Conference 2007 in Birmingham.

The JISC conference provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the Spoken Word’s work alongside the other projects involved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme including DialogPlus (University of Southampton and Penn State University), DART (London School of Economics) and DIDET (University of Strathclyde and Stanford University).

All those inviolved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme shared a stand, answered questions and handed out leaflets to others present at the conference.

The conference also provided the backdrop for a 15 minute JISC funded film promoting the work of the digital libraries in the classroom programmes that includes David and Iain of Spoken Word, Alan Hutton, Douglas Chalmers, various Caledonian University students and the Saltire Centre…by popular demand the film will appear on the Spoken Word site shortly!

The conference was also useful for meeting with people that the project had previously collaborated with. Notably David met with Chris Awre from the University of Hull who, like ourselves, is currently part of the Fedora users group. Recently we have started a new collaboration with the University of Hull in the form of the JISC REMAP project.

However the most notable meeting took place with Tom Loosemore who is project director of BBC 2.0 at JISC. He has played a key role in the BBC’s New Media strategy over the past few years and so the meeting was of great interest. The meeting took place after Tom had presented to the conference about the 15 web development principles that the BBC are currently using as a structure to develop their web services and reach out to even more users. A brief outline of his presentation can be found by clicking here. In the coming months we hope to visit the BBC to talk to staff in the Future Media and Technology department and carry out a presentation about the work of the Spoken Word project.

Photo Courtesy of: ClickCLickElectric