To mark International Digital Preservation Day 2017, the CoSector / UoL digital preservation team is launching a new virtual learning course. The course is called Migration of file formats: understanding loss and how to manage it, and it’s open now for purchase.
The premise behind this course is that migration causes loss. When we change a file from one format to another, we’re introducing profound changes to the data, and the way that data gets presented to us. Even when we think it’s succeeded, there are changes underneath the surface that might be problematic for us. Since this loss is inevitable, you need to plan for it. One way of looking at your preservation strategy is that you are planning for loss caused by migration. How can we identify it, what is causing it, how much of a hit are we prepared to accept?
Click here for Learning Outcomes
This course was presented as a face-to-face course on 20th June 2017. The entire course has now been refitted to work on our VLE platform, and turned into a more interactive and participatory learning experience. It has also been enriched with one or two elements not originally included in the F2F course, due to time restrictions, but possible to teach online now.
How-To Courses
This is our first “Hands-on” or “How To” type course in the VLE. Based on our user surveys and feedback we have received over the years, we believe that students want more hands-on examples learning about digital preservation, and would like to see things happening on the screen more; previously we have taught this by giving students name of tools, links to where they can downloaded, and suggestions about what the tools may do. But now we’re trying to equip and empower users more. So the new course will demo utilities such as FITS, Apache Tika, Xena, and the use of Adobe Acrobat to embed Fonts; and will discuss the output from such tools, what it means, and how it can be used for long-term preservation of file formats.
We’ve done this using screencasts. When you buy your place on the course, all you need do is click one of the learning videos, plug in your headphones, and start learning. The voiceovers are provided by tutor Ed Pinsent, who also wrote the content for the course. Students / customers already in the VLE are asking us for screencasts; we’re providing them. We are persuaded that it’s a more engaging way to learn than simply reading long chunks of text and downloading large PDF files.
Participation
This course is also making use of Assignments as a feature, where students can actively participate in exercises which will drive home the lessons learned about metadata. We’re doing this by offering folders full of sample files, and their metadata, and training you to decode what that XML means. Again, we feel that participation is a better way to learn something for yourself, instead of being lectured. One of these exercises engages you in a discussion of acceptance criteria, which is one of the key ways to understand what properties / metadata you wish to protect.
Here is a sample screencast:
FIle Format Migration: Apache Tika demo from UoL CoSector on Vimeo.
Feedback
In June 2017, we received some very positive remarks from students about the training. Here are some quotes:
“This was quite valuable in getting across the idea that file losses might be inevitable in some cases – it’s a matter of how much/what is an acceptable level. I think that it might depend on the nature of the material in that some characteristics will be more important than others depending on current and future use cases. Ed got that point to us quite clearly.”
“I had no idea how word processing applications use and access fonts, so this was an interesting session for me.”
“Acceptance criteria [was most useful], including the group exercises: I come from a more technical background and this module / activity made me reflect on how to approach preservation planning, different stakeholders involved and the importance of their involvement in planning, scoping decisions.”
“Really appreciated seeing real examples of what changes when migration occurs. The modules which showed what went missing during migration. Useful to know the limitations and implications of migration.”
“Good session and thought provoking – It may be that a newly created version of a document should have the create date of when it was migrated and not the original create date – as long as you can still show that create date of the original document.”
“It’s very rare for me to attend a course that holds my interest all the way through and every single module is extremely useful as well as understandable to me. This course did all that. I also feel that I actually learned a lot as opposed to just acquiring a load of notes I might read later (possibly). My manager commented that I ‘seem to have come back inspired’ and that’s exactly what happened. I did not hit the familiar point of ‘overload’ as I usually do on a course. I found it useful and absorbing right up to the end. It had just the right mix of demos and exercises. I liked the way concepts were introduced, demos illuminated them and the explanations were given.” (Jan Whalen, University of Manchester Library)
Outcomes and benefits
If you sign up for this course, you will get the following:
- Basic learning outcomes – see this page
- Preservation actions demystified – events which are automated in most preservation systems are revealed and played back, allowing you to better understand what is happening
- Basic command line skills using the Windows command line – not unlike James Baker’s “library carpentry” workshops at the British Library
The content remains accessible to you for 12 months after registration. The cost is £99.00.
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