Number 301 - June 2008

Proprietary Catalogues
by George Bowden, Big Blue and Cousins, Victoria, BC, February 2008
Before you spend weeks cataloguing any digital information, consider the problems you might have if the catalogue becomes extinct. Two computer applications, email and digital photographs, illustrate the problem. Digital Photograph Catalogs    Recently a club member tried to move the catalogue of Microsoft's Digital Image Suite (DIS) from an XP machine to a Vista machine. Oh... and Microsoft is retiring DIS. Though I know nothing about Digital Image Suite, I know that the catalog is going to point to pictures in My Pictures. On Vista, the path to your pictures is C:\Users\User\Pictures but on Windows XP, the path is C:\Documents and setting\someone\my documents\my pictures. See the problem?    Hoping to get some help from Microsoft, I find the following in their knowledge base:    "Digital Image Library uses a proprietary database engine that is named SqlLite. SqlLite is not compatible with any other program that we support that you can use to import the data from Digital Image Library. Additionally, SqlLite is not compatible with any other third-party program that we currently know about."    Take a look at the database contents snippet shown on the right (above) to see if you could decode its contents.    So is the club member going to have to re-catalogue his pictures? Turns out, probably not, because Vista's Windows Photo Gallery reads the tags put on the pictures themselves by DIS2006. But only Vista can read those tags. No migration away from Microsoft is possible yet.	Email Storage    Similarly, we need to save emails for posterity. If I backup the Outlook Express email database, only Outlook Express email clients can read them. So I looked for an open standard email storage format. Guess what.. there is none. For the granddaddy of internet applications, email, there is no standard storage format! Closest I could come is the mbox format, with its variants. It is the format Eudora and Thunderbird use, with slight variations between them. At least it is a text-based format, which means if it gets corrupted, I can read the contents with a text based editor. mbox details (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox)    Bottom line... Before you catalogue, check out the import/export capabilities. Otherwise, you might have to do it all again in a couple of years.
Number 301 - June 2008