bram van der werf

OPF foresees a potential market in commercial industry once awareness and subsequently compliance on long-term access become reality. This will have immediate impact on policies, practices and workflow in major enterprises. Major changes in compliance and change in industry are often driven by the major business consultancy firms such as IBM Global Services (formerly Price Waterhouse Coopers), KPMG, Deloitte, Accenture, Ernst & Young and many others. Consultancy firms are strategic partners to gain access to industry. It would be of enormous value to our industry (not for profit memory institutions) if our business practices and tools can be adopted beyond our sector.

Commercial companies will need robust and tools engineered for reliability, this process of re-engineering will bring quality and competitiveness to long-term access tooling and practices. Industry will benefit from the existing thought leadership in the digital preservation network and the network will benefit from engineering competences in technology industry.

MBA students of Cambridge Judge Business School are currently doing market research into the potential for Digital Preservation and Long Term Access tools for a selected amount of of verticals in industry, as part of their MBA program. This research is supported by Microsoft Research and OPF. OPF sponsors the research. By mid December we expect to be able to communicate on the outcome. I will keep you posted in the coming period about progress.

Last Thursday (September 23) during Ipres, I attended the workshop ‘Greater than the sums of our parts’, about collaboration. Lively discussions about sharing information and how we can build a collaborating community.

Maybe we need to take the recent news about PADI stopping its information sharing services as a “lessons learned”?

Coming soon…
OPF Practitioners & Developers Hackathon,

November 15, 2010 User & Practitioner Requirement Workshop

November 16,17, 2010 Developers Hackaton

At the International Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The problem of preserving content in digital form has received widespread attention in the cultural heritage sector, and within the scientific research, higher education sector and beyond. Starting in the early 1990s within the digital library community it is now a recognized problem in business as well. For example personnel records and legal documents may need to be kept for 50 years despite the obsolescence of the computers and software systems that originally authored them. Today major memory institutions, despite being the major stakeholders and thought leaders in this field, suffer from fundamental lack of mature tools and production services. Commercially available standard solutions do not fit the specific requirement for a long-term strategy while bespoke custom made solutions are too costly.

The Open Planets Foundation is a start-up inspired by and building on the pioneering work of the EU funded Planets Project. Amongst its other deliverables, Planets successfully developed best practices, prototype tools and demonstrators that where validated by the sector as solid basis for a solution that addresses this long term access challenge.

Open Planets Foundation will take these tools and practices further and mature them into a comprehensive Open Source Suite. It will provide a coherent and useful set of digital preservation best practises and tools, including preservation planning, costing models, testing and evaluation solutions. OPF will develop a digital preservation services business that can be used both by a memory institute itself, or integrated as part of a solution provided by commercial partners.

Mission

To enable OPF members around the world to meet the long term access and preservation of digital content challenge with a best practices strategy that is widely adopted and actively implemented in the field of cultural heritage organisations and beyond.

Values

• Openness – an open community supporting open technologies.
• Realism – promoting and supporting processes and technologies that can really be taken into practice.
• Pragmatic – first things first, with a high level of appreciation for members’ priorities with regards to DP practises and tools.
• Community – driven towards sharing practises and building a strong DP community.
• Engagement – in-depth understanding of DP challenges.
• Trusted advisor on DP practices.
• Sustain and develop partnerships, make sure that products and services will sustain.
• Adaptable – stay abreast of changing requirement and be able to manage these changes via continuous adoption of innovation and integration of R&D efforts.

Strategy

As part of its mission to establish shared digital preservation best practices and supporting tools, OPF makes these available to its members and beyond. Furthermore, OPF will facilitate and actively foster communities and partnerships that are imperative to achieving the OPF mission and are aligned with its vision.