The British Stand-Up Comedy Archive contains quite a lot of digital material. Partly this is because of the digitisation and digital transfer work we have been doing for preservation and access reasons, but it is also because some deposits have been born-digital. Because of the challenge of managing, preserving and accessing digital material we have been experimenting with different tools to help us manage our digital files more easily.  Hope you find these useful too, and please let us know if you have any great digital preservation tools you’ve been using!

Embedding metadata

• BWF Metaedit – for embedding metadata into wave files (it has a batch processing tool which is nice)
• MP3tag – for embedding metadata into mp3 files (either files deposited in the archive as mp3 or in mp3 access copies we are generating)
• Adobe Bridge – for embedding metadata within image files (ditto with regards the batch processing feature mentioned above).

File Format Identification

• DROID – The National Archives’ tool for profiling file types (for finding out what files you are accessioning e.g. what version of jpeg you have). It can also create hash sums (checksums)

Moving files

• Blackbush – a checksum tool generating MD5 hash files developed for the British Library’s Sound Archive. This is great as it also moves files and folders for you!

Disc Imaging

• ISOBuster – for creating disc images. We’ve used this for creating images of floppy disks and DVDs.

Renaming files

• Flash renamer – useful for renaming files in bulk! We’ve used this, for example, when digitisation has been outsourced and a temporary filename was given by the contractor. A filename based on the catalogue reference number has been later assigned.