Following our first SPRUCE Mashup event in Glasgow, we launched a call for funding that mashup attendees could apply for. The primary aim is to help sustain and support some of the best work that begins at our events. We’re looking to enable mashup attendees to realise fully working tools from promising prototypes, fine tune and embed already working solutions in their workflows and systems, or build on work that supports SPRUCE business case developments. All this is made possible due to SPRUCE Project funding from JISC. We’ve made four awards from this first funding call:

SPRUCE ReACT (Resource Audit and Comparison Tool)

Lead: Ray Moore, ADS

The aim of this project is to produce a generic tool for comparing lists or directories of files, allowing the user to specify what it is they want to compare, whether they want the tool to work recursively through directories and to specify what particular file types should be matched if appropriate (docs with pdfs for example). The generic tool should take into consideration further issues highlighted by the ADS when testing the tool post mash-up, such as the requirement to identify the exact location of files with the same name and order the results lists by filename. The project will build on initial work to address some specific challenges identified at the Glasgow Mashup, resulting in a more widely useful preservation tool.

http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR/File+management+and+matching+of+tif%2C+htm+and+pdf+files+solution

Sprucing up the TikaFileIdentifier

Leads: Susan Thomas and Rebecca Nielsen, BEAM @ The Bodleian Libraries

BEAM collections are archives created by a range of third-parties and contain a good deal of legacy media, including optical media and floppy disks. As a first step in the digital preservation process, a disk image of each disk is generated which is committed to our preservation storage. A challenge faced with the initial capture and ingest of disk images is the time it takes to extract basic descriptive and technical metadata, which can later be used by archivists wishing to plan projects to process the material for researcher access. This challenge was taken to the SPRUCE Mashup at Glasgow in the hope that manual steps could be automated in order to get material into the BEAM preservation systems more efficiently. At the Mashup Peter May developed a prototype solution using Apache Tika, a number of python scripts and WinCDEmu. This project will further develop the mashup solution, improving usability, addressing some speed and reliability issues and scoping (and where possible addressing) some further functionality needs.

http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR/Tika+Batch+File+Identification

Depositing Data from Facebook to MediaWiki

Lead: Toni Sant, M3P at University of Hull

The Malta Music Memory Project (M3P) seeks to provide an inclusive repository for memories of Maltese music and associated arts, ensuring that these are kept in posterity for current and future generations. There have been some difficulties in getting members of the public to engage actively with the project, and in particular to contribute to the project wiki (a MediaWiki installation) rather than just reading it. Meanwhile there are myriad relevant resources and conversations taking place on Facebook. Researchers are currently putting considerable effort accessing and curating these resources on Facebook, but need to find ways to encourage others to do so themselves. Encouraging sign-up to the wiki using Facebook Connect and easing the migration of content from Facebook to the wiki has been identified as a way to achieve this. At the SPRUCE Glasgow Mashup a proof of concept was developed for extracting content from Facebook to MediaWiki, where it could be better curated and preserved. It builds on the existing Facebook Open Graph Extension, which is used to authenticate users to the wiki using Facebook. Upon authentication, custom JavaScript extracts information from the user’s Facebook profile and uses it to populate their User Page in the wiki. Having demonstrated that it is possible to transfer data from Facebook into MediaWiki,this project will build on that work to produce a usable tool with expanded functionality.

http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR/Extracting+content+from+Facebook+to+Mediawiki

Digital Directorate Case Study: Lessons Learned in producing a business case for Digital Preservation

Lead: Sarah Aitchison, Institute of Education

The Institute of Education Archive produced (as part of a JISC funded project) a four-month Digital Directorate case study. This had as an objective the creation of a business case ‘to be submitted to senior management detailing realistic costs for the implementation of preservation procedures for the Institute’s electronic records’. This new project will expand that piece of work to include a detailed examination of the methods used to write the business case, including methodology and lessons learned. The results will feed into the SPRUCE Project’s work on developing a business case for digital preservation.

http://newsamnews.ioe.ac.uk/?tag=digital-preservation

If you’re interested in either working on digital preservation problems alongside the experts, or having your problems solved (with the chance of receiving a funding award to develop your work further) please sign up for a SPRUCE Project Mashup. All of our upcoming events are detailed here, or you can directly sign up for our next Mashup in London in September. See this page for more information on what a SPRUCE Mashup entails.