Bash Scripts for Audio-Visual Preservation

Our conservation and restoration lab uses a set of Bash scripts daily for audio-visual preservation. These small programs are designed to be used individually and jointly chained to each other, as required for different workflows. We are proud to announce that we have now released some of these scripts under a 3-Clause BSD License for the community. The set includes scripts for:

• handling various checksum manifests,
• the BagIt File Packaging Format, as designed by the Library of Congress and standardised under RFC 8493, and
• audio-visual file generation.

All the scripts come with a short embedded help message and the more complex ones also have a manual page (“man”). They have been used successfully on modern x86_64 architectures under various Linux distributions, macOS and Windows 10 running Terminal or Subsystem for Linux.

2020-12-15