Briefing with Colin Webb and Gerard Clifton (NLA staff)

Had a great chat with Colin Webb and Gerard Clifton regarding their perspectives on the GDFR project today. I got a good idea of where NLA initiatives fit into the GDFR work.

We’d really like to be able to run a service that checked file formats across our digital archive and alerted us to potential risks in terms of format obsolescence. This, of course, is one of the possible uses of the GDFR once it’s up and running.

We’d also like to know when the operating environments of file formats are obsolete, for the same purposes – so we can take action on our digital object repository. However, one of the things that came up in discussion was the fact that we can only tell whether a given format is unsupportable, in terms of hardware/software platform, for local purposes. One of the questions we face is: how do we know when we’re unlikely to be able to build a specific hardware/software environment in which to read an historic file format?

I hope that I may gain more of an insight into this, and other issues, through my involvement in the GDFR technical working group (TWG) and through discussion with others in my travels.