Hannah Wang is Senior Digital Preservation Specialist at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is pleased to announce that we have a new blog: Fixity Check! Fixity Check will highlight digital preservation efforts at NARA, from updates to our Digital Preservation Framework, to file format deep dives, to interviews with staff across NARA. In addition to our dedicated digital preservation staff, NARA is fortunate to have experts in electronic records and digital preservation working across the agency, from records policy to archival processing – we are excited to share more information about the work that we do across NARA to ensure long-term preservation and access to our nation’s records.
Image 1: A screenshot of the Fixity Check blog.
Our first series of blog posts on Fixity Check highlight our recent re-release of the Digital Preservation Framework. This was a nine-month effort to review, iteratively update, and reassess all 729 file formats in the NARA Risk Matrix. An invaluable part of this process was community review and feedback: as we discuss in the third post in this series, we received detailed feedback from digital preservation colleagues around the world that helped us to refine the Risk Matrix into the best instrument possible. You can read more about this project and our process on Fixity Check:
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Digital Preservation Framework Re-Release Part 1: What is the Digital Preservation Framework?
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Digital Preservation Framework Re-Release Part 2: What’s Changed?
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Digital Preservation Framework Re-Release Part 3: How Did We Do It?
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Digital Preservation Framework Re-Release Part 4: What Did We Learn?
In the coming months, you can expect to see more blog posts as we continue to update the Framework with new file formats, thoughts on machine learning in digital preservation, details about audiovisual preservation at NARA, and more! We hope that this new, more informal venue to share our work will be of interest to the larger digital preservation community, and we encourage you to engage with us by subscribing and commenting on the blog.