04 Oct 2024
Hi hello! It’s been a few months since I’ve updated this blog, but I’ve been busy. Right now, I’m busy teaching a 4-week workshop to students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign all about a/v preservation tools. Part of their work requires them to group together and make descriptive metadata records for an “preservation-quality file” (in this case, we are using a clip from the ubiquitous Big Buck Bunny, though, to cut down on size...
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24 May 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: ArcGIS Layer File. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. We’ve made it to the last file format!!! Last but not least is ArcGIS Layer Files. They’re a bit of a bonus 2-for-1 deal, too. Layer files store all properties for a GIS “layer.” It doesn’t...
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17 May 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: AppleDouble Resource Fork. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. AppleDouble……………………… Also known as “Dot underscore” files because that’s what they look like, ._likeThis. Are they related to .DS_Store files? Like, in a concrete way? What about MacBinary? Those are some the questions I went through...
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10 May 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Portable Embosser Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. The Portable Embosser Format (PEF) is a document type that represents braille pages in digital form, “accurately and unambiguously; regardless of language, location, embosser settings, braille code and computer environment” (source). Not a lot of info...
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03 May 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Silverlight Application Package. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Okay, this was a fun one! If you remember using Netflix in the early-to-mid 2010s, you might remember having to download this extra thing called Silverlight in order to stream video. For reasons that I would...
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26 Apr 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Apple ProRAW. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. This blog post from Lux on “Understanding ProRaw” is useful not just in what it purports to do, but as an overall explainer for how digital cameras work these days. It’s great! And it explains the format...
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19 Apr 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: IPA. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Like last week’s post on the Android package, the iOS App Store Package is also… (dun dun dun)… just a ZIP archive file! It’s also not really well-disclosed, with no official docs from Apple that specify the .ipa...
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12 Apr 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: APK. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. First off, this work was made incredibly easier thanks to the work of Johan van der Knijff, particularly the blog series around working with mobile apps, the latest being “Towards a preservation workflow for mobile apps” from 2021,...
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05 Apr 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Apple Core Audio Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Core Audio Format (CAF) is a file format for storing and transporting digital audio data. It’s published by Apple. Fully disclosed, thoroughly, with helpful contextual statements. It was introduced in 2005. I am a bit...
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29 Mar 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: XYZ Point Cloud. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. After a handful of difficult and technically (or socially/politically) complex formats, it was nice to work on this simple (if unspecified) format, taking me back to one of the earliest formats I worked on, FASTA. This...
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22 Mar 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Maya Binary Scene File Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. You know, I saved a spot for this format but it really is essentially the same as last week’s, except stored in a binary format instead of a text-based one. I checked to see...
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15 Mar 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Maya ASCII Scene File Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. This format described 3D scenes – geometry, lighting, animation, rendering, other stuff. It’s fairly straightforward, and I felt the documentation was relatively thorough while being succinct. Preservation issues seem to mostly be around concerns...
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08 Mar 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Virtual Reality Modeling Language Family. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. I was getting so overwhelmed surfing the old web for this format. It was absolutely thrilling but exhausting too, like when you’re on your 13th day of vacation and you’re so worn out but...
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01 Mar 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: MicroStation DGN Family. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. This format was really a family of formats, and there’s specifically a break between an older version of the format, documented, and a later version of the format, semi-documented. At the time of writing this blog...
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23 Feb 2024
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: 3D Model File Format Family. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. The next six formats are part of Set 3: 3D, VR and Animation! All of these formats are quite different from each other (except two closely related, which will be obvious). First up: 3DM....
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