Understanding The Digital Format Ecosystem : Short Paper - iPRES 2025 - Wellington, New Zealand / Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa
Abstract
One of the most fundamental facets of preserving born-digital cultural materials is understanding the data formats in our collections. In contrast to the relatively constrained worlds of metadata and digitised materials, born-digital items can come in a huge range of formats, making format identification a crucial step towards understanding the informational and software dependencies we need to capture to make future access possible. How can today’s available file format identification tools and strategies help us understand the formats in our collections, and where are we still lacking ways to gather this critical information? As part of the _Registries of Good Practice_ project (a collaboration between the Digital Preservation Coalition and Yale University Library), we have been analysing and comparing data from a wide range of format identification tools and registries to better understand the current landscape. Combining this with methods drawn from ecological studies of species diversity, we have used the gaps between format registries to estimate the true scale of the format problem. Building on this evidence, we outline how a more distributed and responsive strategy would help us cope with the challenge of preserving our born-digital heritage.Details
- Creators
- Andrew N. Jackson; Claire Fox; Paul Wheatley
- Institutions
- Date
- 2025-09-01 00:00:00 +0000
- Keywords
- digital humanities
- Publication Type
- paper
- License
- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
- Download
- 394084 bytes