So you want to preserve that MSWord novel, those spreadsheets, those AppleWorks fieldnotes forever?
The National Archives of Australia are ahead of you – they’ve developed free and open source software to help in the long term preservation of digital records. Xena! (XML Electronic Normalising for Archives – and I bet they thought hard to come up with the N).
I saw a demo of Xena a couple of years ago, and was greatly impressed by the potential of streamlining the workflow in digital text archives – by detecting the file formats of digital objects, and then converting them into open formats like XML for preservation. Databases remain the nightmare of course.
Anyway, there’s a new release – and here are the details.
From Michael Carden
Sent: Monday, 24 September 2007 9:26 AM
To: Digital Repositories Special Interest Group
Subject: [Drsig] National Archives of Australia releases Xena 4.0
Our Xena digital preservation software is a free and open source tool
for digital preservation. Xena may be used as a desktop application or
(more commonly) via its application programming interface to perform its
two key tasks from within other digital preservation workflows. Xena is
designed to:
* Determine file formats
* Convert files into standards based, open formats for preservation
Key new features in the 4.0 release of Xena are:
* Export facility (un-Xenafy) is now available through the viewer
interface
* Audio plugin is now included by default
* Image file metadata is now extracted from image headers
* Archive plugin (zip, bzip, gzip etc) is now included
Please take a look at the new Xena website
and download your copy, then let us know what you think.
[And for more on digital archives, see the APSR blog]
Follow
Here at Endangered Languages and Cultures, we fully welcome your opinion, questions and comments on any post, and all posts will have an active comments form. However if you have never commented before, your comment may take some time before it is approved. Subsequent comments from you should appear immediately.
We will not edit any comments unless asked to, or unless there have been html coding errors, broken links, or formatting errors. We still reserve the right to censor any comment that the administrators deem to be unnecessarily derogatory or offensive, libellous or unhelpful, and we have an active spam filter that may reject your comment if it contains too many links or otherwise fits the description of spam. If this happens erroneously, email the author of the post and let them know. And note that given the huge amount of spam that all WordPress blogs receive on a daily basis (hundreds) it is not possible to sift through them all and find the ham.
In addition to the above, we ask that you please observe the Gricean maxims:*Be relevant: That is, stay reasonably on topic.
*Be truthful: This goes without saying; don’t give us any nonsense.
*Be concise: Say as much as you need to without being unnecessarily long-winded.
*Be perspicuous: This last one needs no explanation.
We permit comments and trackbacks on our articles. Anyone may comment. Comments are subject to moderation, filtering, spell checking, editing, and removal without cause or justification.
All comments are reviewed by comment spamming software and by the site administrators and may be removed without cause at any time. All information provided is volunteered by you. Any website address provided in the URL will be linked to from your name, if you wish to include such information. We do not collect and save information provided when commenting such as email address and will not use this information except where indicated. This site and its representatives will not be held responsible for errors in any comment submissions.
Again, we repeat: We reserve all rights of refusal and deletion of any and all comments and trackbacks.