January 2012 deposits at ICPSR

January looks like it was a very busy month at ICPSR:

# of files	# of deposits	File format
20	2	F 0x07 video/h264
172	10	application/msword
7	4	application/msword application/msword
1704	4	application/octet-stream
143	31	application/pdf
4	3	application/vnd.ms-excel
4	3	application/vnd.wordperfect
33	1	application/x-dosexec
8	2	application/x-empty
35	6	application/x-sas
32	21	application/x-spss
28	3	application/x-stata
1	1	application/x-zip
2	1	image/bmp
1696	1	image/jpeg
4	1	image/png
7	7	message/rfc8220117bit
3	3	text/html
9	2	text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
142	17	text/plain; charset=us-ascii
2	1	text/plain; charset=utf-8
6	5	text/rtf
1	1	text/x-c; charset=us-ascii
3	2	text/x-mail; charset=unknown
17	3	text/xml

Two items are noteworthy.

One is that we moved a few key systems from older 32-bit machines running older versions of RHEL to new 64-bit machines running RHEL 6.  As it turns out the magic database that file uses on RHEL 6 is in a new format, and did not work well with our local additions (aka localmagic and localmagic.mime for Linux folks).  So my belief is that our file-based format detector threw up its hands more often than usual, and this accounts for the over 1700 unknown (application/octet-stream) format types last month.  I think these are good candidates for a follow-up scan to correct the results.

Two, lots of images.  I know that we are getting a lot of video and images as part of our Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation MET and MET Extension projects, but I also know that none of the files above is from that project.  So where is all of this coming from?  One big deposit....