Bits and Pieces

Announcement of our PDF research project.

More on our adventure with recovering Zip disks!

The click of death and more fun with Zip disks!

We are upgrading the software that runs Deep Blue Data to Hyrax2. This upgrade will results in some changes and improvements to the user interface and functionality of the Deep Blue Data repository.

A brief photo tour of the Digital Preservation Unit's Pop-Up Digital Archiving event for World Digital Preservation Day 2018.

Part 3 of the Personal Digital Archiving series looks at storage options for backing up your digital data.

A quick review of Personal Digital Archiving tips.

Our Digital Preservation Lab now has a cool website with shared versions of our workflows to transfer material off current and obsolete media; information on new and vintage equipment used in the lab; and a selection of reports and research on born-digital preservation.

An examination of our new dark preservation repository with some Poe thrown in for fun!

In the UMich Research Data Services (RDS) group, we see and work with all sorts of data. One particularly thorny variety is netCDF. In Deep Blue Data, we have been getting regular deposits of data in this format, and we didn't know much about it. We had many questions how do we open it, what's its structure, how do researchers create these files and why can the size vary so widely from 100s of MBs to 100s of GBs or even TBs? Jake Carlson, Director of RDS, and I hashed out the idea of creating "profiles" for file formats as quick reference resources for RDS as well as others in the data curation field to help us do our jobs more easily and consistently. So, we thought we'd pilot this idea by creating a “Data Curation Format Profile” (DCFP) for netCDF data files since it seemed like an interesting file format and we were likely to get more of them in the future.