I imagine you've heard about the Just Solve the Problem month already,
but if not, I thought Chris Rusbridge's email to the
digital-preservation list was a good call for participation in the
project ...

//Ed

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Chris Rusbridge <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 4:00 PM
Subject: Just Solve the File Format Problem month: can you help?
To: [log in to unmask]

Some of you will know that Jason Scott, Rogue Archivist, is raising a
citizen's army to attempt to solve the "file format problem*" in the
month of November, 2012. The work is taking place via a wiki at
http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page, with a band of
volunteers (you need to register to make changes to the wiki, by
sending a username and email address to [log in to unmask]). I've
added a few formats and groups of formats myself (at least as
skeletons or empty placeholders).

The best form of help is for some of you who know more about rarer
data formats to register and help by editing the wiki yourself. It's
pretty easy; I've never used MediaWiki before, and everything I've
done so far has been by finding something like it and adapting the
wiki source. Other people can make it beautiful and standardised later
on!

If you can't do that, you could email me information about missing
data formats. This should include as much as possible of:

- name, and what it's for (ie brief description)
- web site with some authoritative information
- web site with some examples, etc.

Let's try and capture ALL these formats. As Jason says in his own
inimitable way "Let's make that goddam army!".

* Note, the "problem" is only vaguely defined, and after some angst
(eg see http://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/the-solution-is-42-what-was-the-problem/),
I think that's OK. Gathering a huge amount of information about file
formats in one place will be a BIG HELP.

--
Chris Rusbridge
Mobile: +44 791 7423828
Email: [log in to unmask]
Adopt the email charter! http://emailcharter.org/