Bits and Pieces

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.

Part two outlining our findings after discovering some moldy floppy disks.

In this post we go over our current computing workstations and peripherals.

The first post on how we are dealing with moldy 5.25 floppy disks.

Major upgrades to our lab space!

A summary of how we transitioned our workflow for forensic imaging.

Update on work done by the Digital Preservation Unit including efforts on the Digital Preservation Lab, digital file formats, and community outreach.

An outline of the workflow developed to image and preserve content from obsolete floppy disks. Part 2 of 2.

An outline of the workflow developed to image and preserve content from obsolete floppy disks. Part 1 of 2.

A report from Pittsburgh on the National Digital Stewardship Alliance's annual conference, Digital Preservation 2017.