Becky McGuinness

For our summer newsletter, we spoke to David Clipsham from The National Archives of the UK who was recently appointed to the OPF Board of Directors.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role

I work as the Technical Architect for the Digital Archiving department at The National Archives. I work with our developers and business owners to design systems and services to support our digital archiving and preservation activities. I also oversee the team’s continuing research activities for the PRONOM file format registry.

How did you get here? What was your path into digital preservation?

It was a happy accident! I previously worked as Customer Services Manager for a social collaboration platform The National Archives hosted on behalf of Central Government, and I had a background in IT systems and application support. I shared an office with the Digital Preservation team and became good friends with them. When my project funding ended I joined the team, initially as a Digital Archives Assistant, and shortly after became the lead researcher for PRONOM. I quickly realised that Digital Preservation was the field I would have always wanted to work in, if only I’d known it had existed sooner!

What are you working on at the moment?

My team is commencing work on a ‘Transfer Digital Records’ service that will help our depositors to prepare and transfer their records across to us. We’re really excited to be working with cloud services for the first time, and we fully intend to ‘code in the open’ on GitHub – I think it’s really important to work transparently where possible.

What do you see as the main benefit of OPF membership?

For me the key benefit is OPF’s commitment to both maintain existing and to develop new software tools that support the digital preservation activities of a variety of types of institutions within and beyond the heritage sector. I’ve also always long admired the platform for knowledge exchange OPF provides – I blogged on the site on file format research before The National Archives even joined OPF, because it felt like the right home for discussing the more technical aspects of digital preservation.

Who are you / what do you like to do in your free time?

I love live music, travelling, and bouldering, and I especially love opportunities to combine those activities. I’m spending part of June in a forest in France climbing rocks, and It’s not unknown for me to head to Germany or beyond to see some of my favourite bands play.

This month we talked to Peter May from the British Library to find out what he has been working on and how he got into digital preservation.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role

As the digital preservation technical architect at the British Library I research, develop and advise colleagues on technical practices and solutions to improve the Library’s digital preservation capabilities. This is quite a varied role, from undertaking detailed file format research, developing analytical scripts to assess collections of our content, defining workflow or system requirements, enhancing preservation software tools and promoting their use, to managing day-to-day technical work on projects such as our current Integrated Preservation Suite, and sharing digital preservation knowledge with Library and external colleagues. That’s miles too much to do by myself, so I have help from my team of 4 technical analysts.

How did you get here? What was your path into digital preservation?

From a software engineering perspective. I joined the Digital Preservation Team at the British Library as a software developer on the EU SCAPE Project in October 2011. This was my first introduction to digital preservation as a discipline. Staff changes within the Library opened the opportunity for what is now my current role; this was initially combined with the SCAPE Technical Coordinator role. Since SCAPE finished I have continued in my architect role, taking on additional responsibility as OPF vice-chair board member.

Prior to the Library, I worked as a software engineer for Philips Electronics (UK) in their Applied Technologies division. Broadly speaking we worked on early product development, so I was often designing and developing prototypes and proof-of-concept demonstrators, or contributing to standards. Over my ~6 years there I worked on a range of different technologies including IPTV metadata (notably the Open IPTV Forum metadata standards), GPS, Bluetooth/Bluetooth Low Energy, Android application development, and healthcare devices.

What are you working on at the moment?

One of my main tasks at the moment is architecting and overseeing technical efforts on our Integrated Preservation Suite project. We’re developing a suite of tools to enhance the Library’s preservation planning capability, largely focussed on automation and addressing the Library’s heterogeneous collections. To achieve this, we’re integrating several components – a knowledge base, a software repository, a policy and planning repository, and a web-based workbench user interface that ties all the components together. We’re just about to start our next phase which will be looking towards producing a robust release of the suite’s components.

What do you see as the main benefit of OPF membership?

Being part of an international community of technically-minded people and the benefits that affords in terms of being able to discuss, enhance and influence the digital preservation solutions which the Library relies upon. JHOVE, in particular, is used within Library workflows and being able to influence the development direction of this tool via the Product Board allows us to suggest timely enhancements that benefit our needs (and hopefully others’ needs too).

Who are you / what do you like to do in your free time?

I’m usually either outdoors walking my dogs, spending time with my family, or doing DIY and decorating around the house. I’ve always enjoyed making things, and this has evolved into little projects around the house; I’ve designed and constructed an in-built bookshelf complete with smart-LED lighting (Philips Hue, naturally) so that I can show off my home library in 16 million colours! It pales in comparison to the King’s Library, though.

On 7 December, I attended the launch of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Blocks in Brussels. I was there on behalf of OPF – we are participating in the E-ARK4ALL consortium who are working on the eArchiving Building Block.

This was the second event from the CEF introducing the three new Building Blocks (Big Data Test Infrastructure, Context Broker and eArchiving) and providing updates from the established Building Blocks (eDelivery, eID, eInvoicing, eSignature and eTranslation). The event was moderated by Jennifer Baker and it was attended by over 130 participants from 35 countries.

Andrea Servida, Head of Unit, eGovernment and Trust at the EC, welcomed participants and set the scene for the day. The purpose of the event was to learn more about the new Building Blocks, take stock of the established Building Blocks and discuss opportunities for the organisations to work collectively to address the challenges ahead. He noted that the digital landscape is constantly changing and the EU is taking a more proactive approach to address this through the first programme that is purely dedicated to digital. The Building Blocks aim to provide reliable services that offer a similar experience across different domains and work seamlessly across borders. The programme aims to bridge the gap between citizens, community and government.

Big data test infrastructure (BDTI)

First up was BDTI. It enables users to be able to discover, access and share big data in a standard way to facilitate data-driven policy making in public administration. The Building Block provides links to data sources, infrastructure, tools and best practice advice.

The BDTI Building Block is creating an ecosystem that covers whole data value chain and has the potential to link to the other Building Blocks such as the Context Broker.

They have created a cloud-based sandbox to simplify how users can test it – to try fast and succeed or fail fast. If the tests are successful they can be exported to a production environment.

BDTI is based on open source standards and technology. The platform contains over 800k datasets from across Europe. It allows users to combine data from different source sources (e.g. big data, open data and internal data), regulate the differences and then generate and publish new data.

Find out more about BDTI

Context Broker (CB)

Different technical interfaces, data models and regulations often prevent the exchange of data. The CB aims to provide break down these silos of information to provide real-time information describing what is currently happening in a particular context.

The CB is managed by FIWARE, a not for profit foundation. Their CEO, Ulrich Ahle, noted that the CB technology is currently being used by 120 cities across 20 countries. Ahle explained that Helsinki has used it to create a smart city platform. As an example, the platform can monitor how many people are using a bus by use of their payment through a  smart card, know whether the bus is on time and can ensure that the traffic lights are green to allow it to catch up on the timetable. In the city of Vienna, users can track car sharing opportunities or find out where emergency services vehicles are in real time, access live cameras and see the traffic. In Eindhoven, the CB has been used to help reduce police incidents on streets with lots of bars. The technology monitors the movement of people without and analyzes sound patterns and volume (but without facial or speech recognition so it does not record personal data) to predict critical situations in the area. The police can use the information to decide whether to attend, but have found that increasing the level of light in the area is often enough to prevent an issue escalating.

All information is described in the same way with open APIs and the technology is open source.

Find out more about the Context Broker

eArchiving

The E-ARK4ALL consortium presented the eArchiving Building Block. This was the only panel of the day that was not an all-male panel.

Janet Anderson explained that the eArchving Building Block is based on the EC FP7 E-ARK project. National archives got together to meet the challenges of new e-government legislation and the new environment of a paperless office. Government administrations want their data to be accessible now, and available and kept safe for the short, medium and long term.

It sounds a simple concept but in practice, it is more complicated as it involves a range of data types from different member states. It is not just national archives that face these challenges – smaller archives, businesses, and personal data is important and it affects different sectors such as healthcare, finance and environment agencies. The E-ARK4ALL consortium is enhancing the outcomes from the E-ARK project. These are robust solutions developed and piloted by national archives across Europe. If you cannot trust your national archive, who can you trust?

Karin Brendenberg gave a short overview of the importance of standards. If you transfer your information, you need to label it properly. The eArchiving Building Block defines different sets of packages. The Submission Information Package (SIP) concerns information coming in, the Archival Information Package (AIP) focuses on what you are storing, and the Dissemination Information Package (DIP) describes what you give out. At the top level is a common specification for all packages. It is human readable so everyone can use it as it is.

E-ARK4ALL is connecting with subject specialists to develop the relevant specifications e.g. eHealth. The consortium has developed tools that are harmonised around the specification accompanied by a sample software portfolio for testing. The outputs follow a modular approach so organisations can choose what suits their use case best. They can also be integrated into existing systems including proprietary systems. The helpdesk is up and running and the specifications, methods and tools are well documented.

Find out more about eArchiving

Lightning talks

After lunch, the four established Building Blocks each gave a lightning talk on their experiences of the programme:

eDelivery

eDelivery supports the secure and reliable exchange of data and documents. It sends messages in a secure way with dynamic addressing. It uses the AS4 implementation guidelines defined in the e-SENS Large Scale Pilot. Organisations can install an open source access point to exchange information with the AS4 messaging protocol. The project was up and running just three months after starting. In Sweden, a strategy report is being written about how they will implement it on a national level. It can be used cross-border but right now it will have an important national benefit and that work will make cross-border interaction easier.

Find out more about eDelivery

eTranslation

eTranslation carries out machine translation on an automated platform. The Building Block work has evolved from the previous system which gave public administration some access, but not much.

They have received over 5 million requests for eTranslation this year ranging from one-page documents to several hundred-page documents. There have been 37 million eTranslations carried out to date, the target is 40 million for the year end.

The platform has several use cases. It is run in the background of the European Data Portal. It’s not visible to end users, but it harvests data and translates it supporting multilingual searches on the website. It is used in the online dispute system to allow basic complaints to be translated. If the complaint is more serious or involves a requirement for significant legal advice they rely on human translation. There are currently no systems at present that are fully automated. Its primary use is to be integrated into digital services, however, it can carry out stand-alone translation of documents.

The system is focused on legislative language and it performs better than generalist language translators in this area. They now need broader data and other specialist information to expand the system.

Find out more about eTranslation

eInvoicing

The eInvoicing Building Block comprises several components: legislation, specifications, tools to test compliance, and online resources. In Ireland, the Office of Government Procurement has been responsible for setting up and implementing the programme. Acceptance of eInvoices by governments makes it easier to carry out transactions in the public sector. There was quite a low adoption rate when the Building Block was first set up. A core part of their work was to raise awareness about the benefits and support facilitation of its use. Today, eInvoicing is accepted as the norm in Ireland. The credibility of the CEF programme and European context has helped to drive the level of interest and take up.

Find out more about eInvoicing

eID

eID supports European citizens to use public services in different countries. It is realised through a set of nodes based on the eIDAS Network; most member states have a chosen reference implementation

They have conducted studies to capture the benefits for different user groups e.g. academics, to define what their needs are and document the value proposition to promote adoption.

Find out more about eID

eSignature

The eSignature portal allows internal documents to be signed in Parliament. It was first used in 2017 to electronically sign a European Directive. It represents a huge leap for IT and legal services. The Estonian government had a strong business case for eSignatures. Estonia operates in a highly digital way, for example, citizens’ documents are issued electronically. If they travel to another European country they are asked for their papers, which are expensive and time consuming to produce.

The technology is based on an open source library. It is compliant with PDF standards as well as the requirements for the signature itself. One technical challenge they have faced is having one document digitally signed using 4 different smart cards. The real challenge, however, is legal, rather than technical.

Find out more about eSignature

Connecting Europe with Building Blocks

Representatives from each of the Building Blocks joined together for the final panel of the day. They reflected on the talks from the day and answered questions from the audience. Each panellist agreed they see value in the other Building Blocks and have gained a better understanding of how they are related. For example, a legal document with an eSignature must be archived for 25 years.

The Building Blocks are intended to be complementary – Ulrich Ahle suggested that a ‘master use case’ could be created to show how all eight Building Blocks could be used together.

The established Building Blocks shared some lessons learned with the new ones:

• The importance of engaging stakeholders is key to take up and adoption.
• A good business case that demonstrates how the technology works, how it is being used and how it saves money is important.
• Good customer support is needed to help users implement the technology.

Resources

All the slides are available here.

The launch was filmed throughout the day. I was really impressed that the highlights were edited, set to music and presented back to the audience to close the event.

Barbara Sierman is the chair of the OPF Board and Digital Preservation consultant at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)

Her generous and long-standing contribution to the digital preservation community was recently recognised when she was presented with the DPC Fellowship at the Digital Preservation Awards 2018. For our winter newsletter, we interviewed Barbara to learn more about her work:

How did you get here? What was your path into digital preservation?

I started at the KB in 2005. After my study of Dutch Literature I started working at PICA Library automation as a consultant. A few years later I decided to broaden my scope and started working at an organisation that maintained core administrative systems of Dutch universities. From there I moved to Cap Gemini as a consultant. Throughout all those years I still did research on 18th century Dutch literature and was involved in several initiatives related to that, like publishing, chairing a foundation and organizing literary meetings. Already during my study I saw the potential of automation for this domain (perhaps now I would have chosen Digital Humanities) and wanted to be involved, so I applied for a vacancy at the KB as digital preservation officer…

What are you working on at the moment?

Two things are important for me now. For the KB the role of a library is changing and we need to discuss what digital material we want to collect (as we don’t have a legal deposit) and whether we prefer the digital version above the physical version. This poses the question what do we see as a publication plus the technical consequences. We are trying to figure that out to have criteria supporting our decisions.

As well as being OPF chair, my other focus is on the activities related to our national Digital Heritage Network, and amongst other things I’m teaching about preservation policies and, as vice chair, I’m involved in organizing iPRES 2019 in Amsterdam.

What do you see as the main benefit of OPF membership?

OPF was originally founded to create a safe place for tools that were developed in European projects. As tools and software are still an important ingredient of digital preservation, I see OPF as an organization that will take care of tools in use in a professional way,  involving the community around those tools, including users and vendors. This is reflected in our new Strategy. The other element is the value of collaborating together and to offer members a place to learn, to improve and to make things happen, like we see in the OPF Interest groups around JHOVE and Significant Properties.

Who are you / what do you like to do in your free time?

I love reading, at least a few books a week! And hiking. Weather permitting I’ll work in our garden-at-a-distance: 20 minutes by bike we have a plot on a garden park with a small wooden house on it, 3 mature birches, several hundred bulbs including the iPRES 2019 tulips and lots of other plants. Every year I promise to give my plants more attention.

For our Autumn Newsletter, we spoke to Micky Lindlar, an OPF director, and highly active member of the digital preservation community:

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role

I am a Technical Analyst at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, which functions as the German National Subject Library for Science and Technology. To put it very broadly: within that role I am responsible for everything concerning “file formats” and “workflows” – including tasks like trouble shooting dodgy PDFs, finding & testing tools to handle different formats and specifying & configuring workflows within our system.

I also lead TIB’s digital preservation team of 5 in daily operations for the preservation of our institutions’ holdings and those holdings of customers, who subscribe to our Digital-Preservation-as-a-Service (DPaaS) offering. The Digital Preservation Lead position naturally comes with the responsibility of ensuring that our processes are still in-line with technological dependencies, producer & user requirements as well as good practice.

How did you get here? What was your path into digital preservation?

I suppose most of us don’t really have a “straight path into digital preservation” and I’m no different. However, when I discovered the field it seemed like everything I had done in life came together – a feeling I still have almost 10 years into my digital preservation life and I consider myself lucky to have ended up in a job I’m still excited about every day.

I’ve always had a deep desire to understand how things worked. As a kid, I had the habit of taking apart various appliances to see how they worked, much to my family’s despair. Later in life, I studied English with a focus on American Literature, because I wanted to better understand the USA as a country and a society. I had a similar motivation for my degree in computer science – I wanted to understand computers better … and figure out how to beat games by finding and exploiting bugs 😉 I worked as an IT administrator for over 6 years and while I really learned a lot in that position and loved the job, I felt there was more. During my student life, I had worked at various university libraries – fond memories of that time led me to a Master’s Program for Library and Information Science, where I learned about Digital Preservation and was hooked immediately. At about the same time, I was fortunate enough to come across a digital preservation position at ZB MED, Information Centre for Life Sciences. TIB, ZB MED and ZBW cooperated in the Goportis Digital Preservation Pilot Project and at the end of the project, I moved on to TIB who hosts the consortially used system.

What are you working on at the moment?

In addition to the day-to-day stuff, we always have several projects going on. One of those is Core Trust Seal Certification – we already completed Data Seal of Approval certification in 2015, followed by nestor seal certification in 2017. At TIB, we see certification as a way to ensure our documentation of processes is where we’d like it to be at and we are currently planning to recertify every 1.5 years, alternating between CTS and nestor certification. We recently reported on our invested resources and the return on that investment in an iPRES 2018 paper.

Another project we are currently working on is establishing workflows for e-journal archiving: in a study conducted last year, we discovered that 64% of our e-journal holdings are currently not covered by Portico or CLOCKSS. I’m also busy continuing my work around PDF – that journey started with work done by myself alongside OPF’s own Carl and Yvonne Tunnat from ZBW. We looked at testing JHOVE PDF validation via a synthetic test set. I’m currently looking at extending that work to cover different PDF profiles.

Lastly, I lead the Digital Preservation Working Group within the Rosetta User Community – the working groups are customer led user forums to collect and formulate enhancement requests which are then passed to the software vendor Ex Libris. Within that group, we are currently busy scoping our requirements for future releases and are anxiously awaiting version 6.0, due to be released in December. It will implement our requirements around METS/PREMIS profile versioning and validation as well as the inclusion of semantic unit preservationLevelType introduced in PREMIS v3. Once the new Rosetta version is out, I’ll be busy testing.

What do you see as the main benefit of OPF membership?

TIB joined OPF via the Goportis consortia back in 2010. At that time, the idea behind membership was mainly around sustaining the outcomes but also the momentum of the Planets project. I joined the OPF board in 2012 and have really enjoyed seeing the organization grow and evolve into what it is today: a community focused on sustaining open solutions – software as well as processes / models – to enable digital preservation.

In my role as a Technical Analyst, I think the biggest benefit of OPF membership is the work around format tools like JHOVE, fido or jpylyzer. Not only has OPF given those tools a home, but as a member I can prioritize bug fixes / feature requests and receive support from OPF staff. In my role as a Digital Preservation Lead, I highly value OPF membership resources for training and knowledge sharing. I often point staff to the now large collection of webinar recordings which includes intros to veraPDF, JHOVE, DPF Manger or command line tools as well as webinars introducing and discussing concepts and processes such as the Outer OAIS – Inner OAIS model or provenance metadata. It’s great to be able to point staff towards these high quality resources.

Who are you / what do you like to do in your free time?

While I don’t take apart as many appliances these days, I’ve maintained a curiosity about how the world works – things as well as people. As such, I love exploring new and familiar places, listening to stories, travelling and trying out new things. I’m equally happy with a cooking spoon, a sledge hammer or a game pad in my hand. Books and music have always been a big part of my life as well – despite being a full-time digital preservation nerd, I prefer the printed book and tangible recordings on CD or vinyl … or, better yet, live performances. I also love being outdoors and am fortunate enough to live with a forest in walking distance.

At our Annual General Meeting in May, Remco van Veenendaal from the National Archives of the Netherlands was elected to join the OPF’s board of directors. I caught up with Remco to find out more about his digital preservation work.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role

As digital preservation officer of the National Archives of the Netherlands (www.nationaalarchief.nl), I am responsible for the development, implementation and updates of our digital preservation policy and practice. Sharing knowledge with the national and international digital preservation community is part of the job, as is coordinating our record keeping and preservation team of 7. I also participate in projects of the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (www.netwerkdigitaalerfgoed.nl/en/), and lead their persistent identifier project.

How did you get here? What was your path into digital preservation?

Before I joined the National Archives of the Netherlands, I led a project of the Dutch Language Union. We collected, managed and made digital Dutch language resources available for re-use. We didn’t call it digital preservation, but that was what we were doing. From digital preservation of the nation’s language to digital preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage conceptually wasn’t that giant a leap, but I still learn something new every day.

My interest in language resources stems from my study Alfa-Informatica (Alpha-Informatics, the combination of language and computers) at the University of Groningen. I graduated in artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

What are you working on at the moment?

We introduced a Preservation Watch scheme based on the PLANETS Functional Model and are fine-tuning it this year. This Preservation Watch is one of the building blocks for our repository’s (e-depot) quality management. Other building blocks are the application for a Core Trust Seal certificate and our work on the implementation of a Digital Preservation Capability Maturity Model.

I am also involved in digital preservation education initiatives. One example is that in September, another edition of the blended learning course Leren Preserveren (Learning Preservation www.lerenpreserveren.nl) will start. Together with the other two coaches, we have evaluated the spring edition, and are preparing for September. I worked as a lecturer/technologist in Birmingham, U.K., for two years, obtained my post-graduate certificate in education and still benefit from what I learned there.

What do you see as the main benefit of OPF membership?

A saying in (language and speech technology) research is that “there’s no data like more data”. I’d like to paraphrase that: “there’s no tools like better tools”. What I’ve also learned is that, yes, we do need tools, but we also need people and (inter)national cooperation. The OPF brings together this unique combination of digital preservation tools, people and cooperation. I’d like to help influence the EC to put digital preservation back on the agenda, with OPF as a recognised centre of competence (and preferred project partner) for digital preservation.

Who are you / what do you like to do in your free time?

Language and speech technology is one of my hobbies (see www.veenentaal.nl). Another hobby is playing games: board games like The Settlers of Catan, computer games like the Witcher 3 (on my home-built gaming PC) or retro games on older home computers (emulated on my kids’ Wii). Recently, I took an interest in not just playing games, but also creating them. The digital preservation board game Preservia – which I blogged about on the OPF website – is one example. I also created a board game about korfball, another one of my hobbies. I have played this unique mixed team sport for many years, and am trainer/coach of one of the teams of the local korfball club where my son plays.