Bits and Pieces

Updates on our work in digital preservation and research data.
Insides of hard drive

Posts in Bits and Pieces

Showing 31 - 40 of 70 items
  • Jake Carlson
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.
The UM Library Digital Preservation Unit's Pop-Up Digital Archiving Clinic on World Digital Preservation Day 2018
  • Scott David Witmer
A brief photo tour of the Digital Preservation Unit's Pop-Up Digital Archiving event for World Digital Preservation Day 2018.
Store display of commercially-available external hard drives
  • Scott David Witmer
Part 3 of the Personal Digital Archiving series looks at storage options for backing up your digital data.
  • Scott David Witmer
A quick review of Personal Digital Archiving tips.
A open sign in a shop window
  • Lance Thomas Stuchell
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.
Black and white image of a creepy raven perched on a rock
  • Lance Thomas Stuchell
An examination of our new dark preservation repository with some Poe thrown in for fun!
First page of netCDF DCFP
  • susan borda
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.
Mold removal setup
  • Christina Min
Part two outlining our findings after discovering some moldy floppy disks.
Picture of a workstation with a happy cartoon character as the desktop image
  • Lance Thomas Stuchell
In this post we go over our current computing workstations and peripherals.
Moldy floppy disk
  • Christina Min
The first post on how we are dealing with moldy 5.25 floppy disks.