Study Questions

  • Each week 1-2 students will be responsible for posting "study/reading questions" for the

next week. These should be posted by Friday afternoon. The questions may include issues to note in the reading as well as issues not raised by the reading.

Short Assignments

  • TBD

Project

The project for this class may be a paper or a programming project with a (shorter) report.

  • One page proposal October 16
  • 10 minute presentation December 4/6
  • Report December 16

Project Ideas

  • Use an open source migration library (e.g. for koffice or openoffice) to evaluate migration risk -- features not supported by the library could be identified
  • Use "union" file system ideas to provide a user friendly rendition of a document collection. For example, an iso image of a cd might be overlayed with help files or substitute installers. Perhaps a standard set of files could be developed for a CD-ROM collection.
  • Analyze documents from the GPO cdrom collection
  • Test emulation environments
  • Develop an open source emulation platform (e.g. wine, open office, linux) and test on a document collection: I've tested this a little bit on the CIC floppy disk project and I believe it is doable.
  • Emulation based game "kiosk" for obsolete msdos/windows games.
  • Emulation based GIS system
  • Explore use of openoffice in vmware player to support US GPO documents on CDROM.
  • Explore dosemu and wine to support proprietary applications on US GPO CDROM/Floppy
  • Scripts to automate creation of "preservation rendition" of CDROMS to meet smithsonian recommendations.
  • Demonstrate user space file system to provide "migration on demand" for wordperfect/word to html (perhaps use openoffice in batch mode, fuse file system or

php webdav file system)

  • Use office/windows running in vmware to convert office files to pdf or html on demand (using vmware script interface to transfer files, run scripts)
  • Create an accurate "magic number" file for the Government CDROM collection (perhaps use contextual information for files which have no good signature, e.g. dbase ndx)