biological clock & digital preservation

It worked! Last night I went to sleep a little earlier than usual (which I didn’t do the night before). Before falling asleep I made sure my alarm was turned on and was set to an obnoxious sound. This morning I woke up an hour before the alarm, I think I was terrified to be jolted awake by the alarm sound, I went back to sleep and then woke up 15 minutes before the alarm. Had time to make some herbal tea and look through my day-planner. I began by dumping all the things I knew were coming up onto a piece of paper I titled “Mental Inbox: June 12th” – then took all these plans and deadlines and transfered them into the appropriate times and dates in my planner. This morning I’m much more relaxed and ready to tackle anything.

PRESERVATION METADATA
An e-mail this morning notified me that PREMIS version 2.0 has been published. In a nut shell the PREMIS data dictionary deals with preservation metadata, a subject I find fascinating but also rather dry. Perhaps I find dry things fascinating. It’s not information for everybody, but I believe if the concepts could be boiled down for the average person it could be a great help in preserving digital items on a personal level. For example, someone came into my office the other day asking if I had access to any Mac’s running OS 9 (which I didn’t). They had a proprietary datafile that they couldn’t open in OS X and couldn’t think of anyway to get to the data. Without being able to look at the data I could only make general recommendations on how I might go about retrieving the data, which was apparently rather important. If there were any sort of information about the specific operating system requirements, applications which could read and/or write to the data, creator application, etc. the chances of retrieving the data, as well as the ease of doing so, would be significantly increased.
You can find out more about PREMIS here.