Oxford Common File Layout and Personal Digital Collections

[roaku 842]

In the library world, there's been a lot of work for a lot of years on figuring out how to present and preserve digital assets.

The Oxford Common File Layout is a relatively new concept that's gaining traction.

It's goal, among other things, is to make it so that the file structure of your content itself reflects and contains everything you need to know (metadata) about your collection(s) (data) and to make that file structure application agnostic and portable.

In theory, you would just point any application that supports the spec at your collection and be ready to go.

Anyway, it's interesting to think about the potential in terms of using and preserving personal collections through media apps like Emby.

I wonder what things will look like for personal media in ten years?

 

Quote

This Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) specification describes an application-independent approach to the storage of digital information in a structured, transparent, and predictable manner. It is designed to promote long-term object management best practices within digital repositories.

Specifically, the benefits of the OCFL include:

• Completeness, so that a repository can be rebuilt from the files it stores
• Parsability, both by humans and machines, to ensure content can be understood in the absence of original software
• Robustness against errors, corruption, and migration between storage technologies
• Versioning, so repositories can make changes to objects allowing their history to persist
• Storage diversity, to ensure content can be stored on diverse storage infrastructures including conventional filesystems and cloud object stores

 

https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/7/2/39/htm

https://ocfl.io/

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

Looking at that with a somewhat skeptical eye but open to the idea I quickly realized that the whole idea was solving a problem that did not exist and really seems to be the result an "intellectual" individual or group making a strong effort to justify their existence. 

There is really nothing that seems to be solved and it seems even more that it solves a problem that is just as easily solve by a little common sense.

I expect the the "government" will love this as it could create a structure that will provide employment for hundreds low intelligence people. Just what we need in this world. It will mean that the ranks of McDonalds employees will have to see a pay increase.

Again it is a solution for a problem that only exist in the minds of its creators.

[roaku 842]

It's also possible that your perspective is skewed by not being a museum or a library tasked with preserving unique elements of human history in perpetuity.

Edited December 10, 2020 by roaku

[pwhodges 2012]

I can see how it might be useful, but it's also essentially trivial (I used to be involved with archiving data in another part of Oxford University).

Paul

Edited December 10, 2020 by pwhodges

[roaku 842]

Ya, I think portability across implementing applications (or even migrating from 3x to 4x for a particular repository ) and human readability of the file structure are the main benefits.

And it's not that these concepts are particularly innovative or require fancy implementations. It's just people (hopefully) agreeing to do something in a better way for the sake of the data, rather than the individual apps or organizations.

For me personally, I switched from Synology's Video Station to Emby and had to completely restructure my data *and* start over with my metadata (neither app cared that I had perfectly good metadata already in the file containers ).

That's not a knock on Emby. It's the best option I've found by quite a bit. It's just the state of things in managing personal media.

Things are both better and worse in the library world, but everybody's trying real hard.

 

Edited December 10, 2020 by roaku

[PenkethBoy 2068]

well dont look at the music thread in beta - it will blow your mind

[roaku 842]

For whatever reason, embedded music metadata has a lot more support in apps than embedded video metadata.