The OPF is collaborating on an exciting new project that is aiming to enhance our ability to validate the condition of digital content. The AQuA Project is running two mashup events in April and June that will focus on developing our understanding of collection issues, such as bit rot or digitisation errors, and develop ways of automatically detecting these problems in large collections. Without automation, QA remains a costly and fallible manual effort.

The events will be an opportunity to engage in hands on digital preservation work, with an emphasis on collaboration between the particpants. We are inviting collection owners to bring along samples of their digital collections that we can work with. We will match them up with preservation and technical experts who will help to define potential collection issues and develop automated QA approaches. This will all take place in our AQuA workshops, the first of which be held from the 11th to the 13th of April in Leeds, UK.  If you’d like to get involved you can find more information and registration details on the AQuA wiki:

http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/AQuA