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The Large object handling capabilities of SIARD

Learn about SIARD’s large object handling (LOB, BLOB) capabilities in the third eArchiving Initiative training webinar.

A table of the Archiving Digital Heritage Research Databases (s. XVIII - XIX)

No attribution required

The third eArchiving Initiative training webinar examines the large object (LOB) handling capabilities of SIARD (Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases). Large objects are generally binary data in a database. Binary data is mainly referred to as a binary large object (BLOB), and large character-based data are named character large objects (CLOB). From version 2.0, the SIARD specification supports three possible archival scenarios for storing LOBs:

  1. Internal BLOBs – BLOBs contained in the database records
  2. External BLOBs – BLOBs stored outside the database records but within the SIARD file
  3. External BLOBs – BLOBs referenced from SIARD but stored as files outside the SIARD file

This tutorial is based on the use case of the SQL database archiving pilot by the Hungarian Digital Heritage National Laboratory and the Digital Humanities Department of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Three research databases about XVIII–XIX century Hungarian novels, popular publications and literary correspondence have been preserved as SIARD files. The pilot uses several E-ARK/eArchiving specifications such as SIARD, E-ARK SIP, and CITS SIARD, as well as the Database Preservation Toolkit, RODA-in and RODA software components.

The training webinar will take place on Thursday 15 June 2023, 10.00 - 11.00 CEST and will be hosted by István Alföldi (POLIPHON).

Practical information about the webinar will be provided once the participant is registered.