We are pleased to share our new website with you! The new site has a modern look and feel and offers a user-friendly experience with improved navigation and functionality. 

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director, OPF, said:

“The new website positions the OPF for the future. It helps our members and friends to discover the many ways that the Foundation supports the digital preservation community. We encourage you to explore the benefits of being an OPF member and to join us.”

Becky McGuinness, Community Manager of the OPF said:

“The launch of our new website is one of several initiatives that celebrates the OPF’s 10-year anniversary. Our users will enjoy easy access to popular content such as our community blogs and product information, as well as new features such as a comprehensive resources page and a dedicated member area.” 

We would like to thank the members who participated in our user testing, as well as our board of directors for their guidance and support throughout this project. 

While we have been working hard to ensure that the new website is ready for the launch date, we anticipate that a few small errors or omissions may come to light in the coming days and weeks. We encourage you to explore the site thoroughly and contact us with any feedback – we’d love to hear from you!

2020 marks 10 years of the Open Preservation Foundation. In honour of this occasion, we are hosting a global conference to celebrate together with our members and friends in the digital preservation community. OPFCON will take place on 10 June at the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

We are now offering sponsorship opportunities for OPFCON on a first-come, first-served basis. Becoming a sponsor is a great way to demonstrate your support for open sustainable digital preservation. Each package also delivers a range of benefits, from complimentary registrations, speaking and networking opportunities, to promoting your organisation’s brand, and more. 

For details of the packages and to learn how you can become a sponsor, visit the OPFCON event page. 

We received a fantastic response to our call for contributions, and OPFCON promises to be an exciting event. We are asking for your support to make this a truly special celebration of the OPF’s 10-year anniversary.

The Open Preservation Foundation is delighted to welcome the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Sound and Vision) as our newest member. 

Sound and Vision is a leading media archive that identified sustainable digital preservation as one of its leading business processes. Founded in 1997, Sound and Vision is responsible for collecting, preserving and presenting the national audio-visual heritage of the Netherlands. Its public task is two-fold: the organisation acts as the corporate AV-programme archive for the Dutch public broadcasting system (Nederlandse Publieke Omroep or NPO) and as a national cultural and historical media institute for education, academic research, and for the general public.

Sound and Vision’s collections consist of digital-born and analogue radio and television programmes, and 13 digitized legacy collections (film, audio and video). More recently, selections of web videos, websites, games, text materials and specific object types have been added. Sound and Vision’s digital repository amounts to more than 26 petabytes – over 1 million hours of AV materials.

Johan Oomen, head of Research and Heritage Services, said:

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision first worked with the OPF on the PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) project, which focused on the development of open standards and open source long-term digital preservation solutions. With its membership, Sound and Vision is proud to support the OPF’s collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools and supporting resources

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF said:

We are very pleased to welcome the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision to the OPF. Sound and Vision has a wealth of experience in research and development: exchanging knowledge on all aspects of audiovisual archiving. They bring a unique perspective to our community, and we look forward to their contributions to our diverse programme of member activities.

Sound and Vision joins the OPF’s growing membership, a growing number of libraries, archives, universities, vendors and research organisations that make up OPF membership. To find out more about the benefits of becoming a member, visit http://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/. 

Find out more about Sound and Vision at beeldengeluid.nl/en/knowledge.

Due to several requests to extend the deadline of the call for contributions to OPFCON, the final deadline is now 17:00 CET on Friday 31 January.

OPFCON will take place on 10 June at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. The theme is open sustainable digital preservation. OPFCON celebrates 10 years of the OPF and to mark this occasion we invite you to join us at our global conference to share your work and consider how OPF has helped shape the digital preservation community.

We welcome contributions that consider the following areas:

• Knowledge sharing, policy and best practice 
• Innovation and technology
• Sustainability through community collaboration 

Contributions may take the form of presentations, panels or roundtable sessions, lightning talks or posters.

Read the full call for contributions and submit a proposal here.

Submissions will be reviewed and selected by the OPFCON working group, comprising OPF members. Submitters will be informed of their selection in February. 

We look forward to hearing from you!

We are extending the deadline of the OPF digital preservation community survey until Friday 7 February. Thank you to everyone who has participated so far – we have already received responses from organisations in over 20 countries!

Digital preservation is an active and growing field and the more we know about it, the more we can do to support its development. No matter the size of your organisation or your level of digital preservation experience, we want to hear from you! We encourage all respondents to share the survey among their networks so we can work together to produce a detailed picture of the digital preservation landscape today and use this knowledge to support its future. 

All respondents will be entered into a prize draw for a free ticket to OPFCON – a global celebration of 10 years of OPF in June 2020. There will also be goodies up for grabs – keep your eyes on our twitter page (@openpreserve) for more information about our giveaways.

Participating organisations will receive early access to the survey report as well as the anonymised data. This allows organisations to benchmark their practice with others and carry out your own analysis of the results.

Fill in the survey

More information (including a printable copy of the questions) is available here.

With the holiday season just around the corner, we are pleased to share our 2019 End of Year Highlights with the community. The report showcases our achievements over the past year, from facilitating vital knowledge exchange to ensuring support for the tools relied on by the community.

Read the report to find out more about our work to realise our vision of open sustainable digital preservation.

2020 marks 10 years of the Open Preservation Foundation. To honour this occasion, we invite you to join us at a global celebration on 10 June at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. OPFCON celebrates a decade of OPF, considers our impact on the community, and reflects on our role in the future of digital preservation.

The call for contributions is now open!

The theme of OPCON is open sustainable digital preservation and we invite contributions that consider the following areas:

• Knowledge sharing, policy and best practice
• Innovation and technology
• Sustainability through community collaboration

Visit our event page to see the full call for contributions and submit a proposal.

A new memorandum of understanding has been signed by the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) and the DLM Forum. 

The memorandum was signed at the DLM Forum Members’ Meeting in Helsinki by Remco van Veenendaal, Director, OPF Board, and Jan Dalsten Sørensen, Chair of the DLM Forum. The agreement facilitates both parties to build a collaborative partnership to address existing and emerging challenges in long-term archiving and digital preservation, and to ensure a sustainable future for tools and knowledge.

Jan Dalsten Sørensen said:

“We have been working closely with OPF for a number of years and their vision and objectives align with our own. This Memorandum of Understanding enables us to work together to reach our shared goals”.

“We have already worked alongside the DLM Forum on a number of innovative initiatives, including the E-ARK4ALL project,” explained Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF.  “We are very much looking forward to further developing our productive working relationship. Moreover, this MoU will help us to better coordinate our activities for the benefit of both OPF and DLM Forum members, as well as the wider digital preservation community”.

“Both of these organisations share a commitment to expanding the sustainability of standards and software,” said Remco van Veenendaal. “It was a pleasure to sign this Memorandum of Understanding on behalf of the OPF, and I look forward to seeing the fruits of this exciting partnership.”

About

The Open Preservation Foundation is a global not-for-profit membership organisation working to advance shared standards and solutions for the long-term preservation of digital content. Founded in 2010 as a result of the EU Planets project, the OPF now leads a collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools and supporting resources. This set of tools (including software and standards) enables organisations to evaluate, validate, document, mitigate risk, and process digital content to be preserved in line with desired policies and community best practice.

The DLM Forum is a vibrant community of public archives and interested parties from across government, commercial, academic and voluntary sectors who are active in information governance, including archives, records, document and information lifecycle management. It was founded by the European Commission and first met in 1996. Today it is a not-for-profit foundation providing industry specifications, participating in activities and serving members from all over Europe and the rest of the world. 

We would like to invite you to take part in the Open Preservation Foundation’s Digital Preservation Community Survey. 

First carried out in 2015, the OPF Digital Preservation Community Survey is designed to capture community approaches to digital preservation, identify the tools you rely on and which resources you use to support your work. 

The OPF leads a collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools and supporting resources. The results from this survey will reveal shared priorities and gaps in digital preservation today, helping us to focus our community contributions. 

What will be done with the information?

We will analyse the data and produce a report. Both the findings and anonymised data will also be published openly; this will enable you to carry out your own analysis of the results and benchmark your practice with others. The results will be fully anonymised so that individual institutions cannot be identified. OPF members and survey respondents will have priority access to the findings and our report.

What’s in it for you?

Digital preservation is a growing community and the more we know about it, the more we can do to collectively support its development. No matter the size of your organisation or your level of digital preservation experience, we want to hear from you! We also encourage all respondents to share the survey among their networks so we can work together to produce a detailed picture of the digital preservation landscape today and use this knowledge to support its future. 

All respondents will be entered into a prize draw for a free ticket to OPF’s 10th-anniversary summit in Vienna in May 2020. There will also be goodies up for grabs – keep your eyes on our twitter page (@openpreserve) for more information about our giveaways. 

How to fill out the survey

Here is the link to the survey

The survey deadline has been extended to Friday 7 February.

We thank you in advance for the time it will take you to respond. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. 

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is very pleased to welcome Harvard Library as its newest member.

Harvard Library is the largest academic library in the world, tasked with stewarding the world’s knowledge for Harvard and sharing Harvard’s knowledge with the world. The Harvard Library advances scholarship through fundamental commitments to the creation, application, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge, and provides its stakeholders with curated discovery, physical and digital collections of extraordinary breadth and depth, reimagined physical space, and specialised research support.

“The OPF plays a vibrant international role in raising awareness of and encouraging effective responses to critical issues of digital preservation theory and practice.” said Stephen Abrams, Head of Digital Preservation at Harvard Library. Harvard Library is delighted to join OPF and looks forward to supporting and participating fully in OPF’s significant advocacy, education, and community development efforts and promoting and enhancing its open source technology portfolio.”

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF, said:

“It is fantastic to welcome Harvard Library to our growing membership. They have a unique digital collection and bring a wealth of experience to the community and we look forward to facilitating discussions and initiatives amongst members. We are excited to be supporting Harvard Library in their plans to open source their Electronic Archiving System and bringing it into the OPF reference toolset.”

Harvard Library joins a vibrant community of members from across the globe, all of whom share a commitment to OPF’s vision of open sustainable digital preservation. To find out more about the benefits of becoming a member, visit https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

About Harvard Library

Engaging users through curated discovery, digital collections, reimagined physical space, and specialized research support, Harvard Library delivers exceptional experiences to its user communities. Serving as an information hub, the Library connects users to related disciplines and to University-wide teaching resources. Today, Harvard Library’s holdings range from traditional print collections to rapidly expanding digital resources. It is the work of the Harvard Library to provide the University’s faculty, students, and researchers—now and in the future—with comprehensive access to these materials. For more information about Harvard Library’s digital preservation work visit: https://preservation.library.harvard.edu/digital-preservation.

About the Open Preservation Foundation

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is a global not-for-profit membership organisation that leads a collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools. Founded in 2010 to steward the results of EU-funded R&D, the Foundation enables the development of best practice through interest groups, community events, webinars, and training. The OPF’s vision is open, sustainable digital preservation. To learn more about The Open Preservation Foundation see, https://staging.openpreservation.org/.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is delighted to announce that we have become an affiliate member of the Open Source Initiative® (OSI). The OSI is the global non-profit formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source software, development, and communities.

OSI affiliate members participate directly in the direction and development of the OSI through the Board of Directors elections as well as incubator projects and working groups that support software freedom. OSI membership provides a forum where some of the world’s most successful open source software leaders, projects, businesses, and communities engage through member-driven initiatives to promote and protect open source software, while also extending and improving their open source efforts through co-creation, collaboration, and community.

Open Preservation Foundation’s work exemplifies multiple dimensions of openness, not only as a maintainer of several open source tools and an open community for collaboration but also through their work ensuring digital content in many formats remains accessible and usable,” said Patrick Masson, OSI General Manager. “We’re grateful for OPF’s support as a member and look forward to their contributions as a community.”

The OPF joined the OSI because we share a commitment to raising awareness and advocating for open source software,” said Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF. “We maintain a set of open source file format validation tools and look forward to exchanging ideas with new communities and sharing our experience in digital preservation.”

The OSI Affiliate Member Program, available at no-cost, allows non-profit and not-for-profit organisations – unequivocally independent groups with a clear commitment to open source – to join and support the OSI’s mission to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community.

About the Open Source Initiative

Founded in 1998, the Open Source Initiative promotes and protects open source by providing a foundation for community success. It champions open source in society through education, infrastructure, and collaboration. As the steward of the Open Source Definition, the OSI is recognised internationally as the sole standards body for certifying open source licenses and preventing abuse of the open source concept by bad actors. The (OSI) is a California public benefit corporation with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. You can find more about the OSI at, https://opensource.org/.

About the Open Preservation Foundation

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is a global not-for-profit membership organisation that leads a collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools. Founded in 2010 to steward the results of EU-funded R&D, the Foundation enables the development of best practice through interest groups, community events, webinars, and training. The OPF’s vision is open, sustainable digital preservation. To learn more about The Open Preservation Foundation see, https://staging.openpreservation.org/.

Following the success of our JHOVE development hack week earlier this year, we are excited to announce the OPF’s first dedicated document hack week.

We invite contributors of all levels of experience to help with translations, module information, feature extraction and configuration documentation, and more!

We particularly welcome newcomers to the tools in the OPF reference toolset, as there will be opportunities to learn basic Schematron and learn about veraPDF’s feature exaction configuration.

To find out more and to register, visit the event page on our website.

The AGM 2020 and 10th-anniversary summit will take place on 9-10 June at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Please put the dates in your calendars!

The standard AGM meeting will take place on  9 June. 

As 2020 marks the 10th birthday of OPF, we are planning an anniversary summit (a one-day conference) on 10 June.

To accommodate our growing team, the OPF has moved to a new office in the centre of Leeds. Our new address is:

Open Preservation Foundation
10-12 East Parade
Leeds
LS1 2BH

You can also contact us online or find us on twitter.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the British Library for hosting the OPF since it was founded in 2010.

Our first online Hack Week of 2019 will take place 8-12 April

We invite you to join contributors around the world to help improve JHOVE, an open source file format validation tool for digital preservation. We have extended the event format from a day to a week to make it easier for people to join in as and when they can. Our past online hack days were a great success, and collectively we achieved a huge amount in just 24 hours:

• https://staging.openpreservation.org/blog/2017/05/09/jhove-spring-clean/
• https://staging.openpreservation.org/blog/2016/10/19/jhove-online-hack-day-report/

This hack week will focus on development tasks, and we plan to run another hack week in September to address documentation tasks. We will be concentrating on the ‘quick fixes’ to reduce JHOVE’s issue list on GitHub and make it easier to plan future releases.

The 2019 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Open Preservation Foundation will take place on 22-23 May in Den Haag, Netherlands, kindly hosted by the Nationaal Archief and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. We invite two representatives from each of our member organisations to join the meeting – please put the dates in your diaries!

The AGM presents an opportunity to review the Foundation’s work over the past year and shape priorities for the year ahead. It is also an occasion to connect with other members to exchange knowledge and experience and reflect on your role within the community.

veraPDF workshop

The AGM will be followed by a ‘Getting Started with veraPDF’ workshop on 24 May which will also take place in Den Haag.

The Open Preservation Foundation is delighted to welcome CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland as its newest Charter member.

CSC is a Finnish non-profit state enterprise with an important role to steer and develop education, science and cultural policy elements for Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. CSC offers technology and service development solutions for research, education, culture and public administration.

CSC produces sustainable national digital preservation services for both cultural heritage and research data. CSC’s preservation services are developed in close collaboration with the organisations using the services to preserve their digital assets. Additionally, CSC maintains national preservation specifications, develops software, and offers support for national organisations on various aspects of digital preservation.

Kimmo Koivunen, CSC’s Development Manager, said:

OPF is doing important work in maintaining and developing open source solutions for digital preservation. We see these shared solutions as a key element in our efforts to produce national digital preservation services for cultural heritage and research data. We are looking forward to collaborative efforts in the future that will develop new preservation methods, models or tools for the digital preservation community.”

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF, said:

We are delighted to welcome CSC to the OPF and to expand our membership base to yet another country. CSC’s belief in the value of knowledge sharing and collaboration is very much allied with our own. As a strong technical organisation, we anticipate working closely with them as we continue to improve the OPF reference toolset.”

CSC joins a growing number of libraries, archives, universities, and vendor organisations that make up OPF membership. To find out more about the benefits of becoming a member, visit https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

Find out more about CSC at: https://www.csc.fi/en and http://digitalpreservation.fi/en

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) and the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (DDHN) have signed a new Memorandum of Understanding to reaffirm their commitment to work cooperatively.

This agreement builds upon the existing MOU between the OPF and the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation (NCDD). The NCDD merged into the Dutch Digital Heritage Network in 2018, creating a single national collaboration platform for all institutions.

The new agreement was signed on 24 January 2019 at the National Library of the Netherlands during an OPF Board meeting.

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF, said:

The OPF and DDHN share common goals to advance digital preservation knowledge and technology. I am pleased to renew the agreement and look forward to further collaboration with the DDHN.”

Marcel Ras, Digital Preservation Programme Manager of the DDHN, said:

This agreement commits our two organisations to continue to share work plans and collaborate on joint activities. The DDHN and OPF have complementary areas of expertise and this partnership benefits both our memberships and the rest of the digital preservation community.”

About OPF

The Open Preservation Foundation is a global not-for-profit membership organisation that leads a collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools. Founded in 2010 as the Open Planets Foundation to steward the results of EU-funded R&D, the Foundation enables the development of best practice through interest groups, community events and training. The OPF’s vision is open sustainable digital preservation.

About DDHN

The Dutch Digital Heritage Network is a partnership that focuses on developing a system of national facilities and services for improving the visibility, usability, and sustainability of digital heritage. The network consists of a growing number of Dutch organizations underlining the principles of collaboration in providing open and continuous access to digital heritage. The DDHN highly values their relations with international partners, as digital heritage should cross all borders.

As 2018 draws to a close, we are pleased to publish our End of Year Highlights and share them with the community. This report showcases our work over the past year, including an overview of our knowledge sharing and best practice activities, updates about the maintenance and development of our open source digital preservation tools, and a round-up of exciting news items and facts and figures. We are happy to welcome new faces to both the OPF staff and to our growing membership, feature new projects and celebrate the valuable insights of all who have contributed to the community in 2018.

Read the report to find out how we are working to reach our vision of open sustainable digital preservation.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is pleased to welcome the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg (BnL) as our most recent charter member.

As part of its legal missions as a national heritage library, the BnL collects, catalogues, enriches and preserves all publications issued in Luxembourg as well as all those issued abroad relating to the Grand Duchy. The BnL has been the country’s central cultural, scientific and research library since its founding.

The BnL has been digitising documents from the Luxemburgensia collection since 2002. Its mass digitisation program falls within the context of the European Union’s objectives to make Europe’s cultural and intellectual heritage accessible online. Through the development of their Digital Preservation project, the BnL seeks to ensure the management, availability and long-term preservation of digital publications, resulting from a digitisation process, collections of born digital material or coming through the digital legal deposit.

Roxana Maurer, Digital Preservation Coordinator at the BnL said:

The Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg is pleased to join other worldwide member institutions of the Open Preservation Foundation to address the challenges of digital preservation together. As a member of the OPF, the National Library will not just follow international standards and best practices, but also participate in their development through specialist projects, initiatives and task forces.”

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF said:

We are very happy to welcome the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg to the OPF and bring the perspective from another new country to our membership. We look forward to working with them and facilitating our members to share experience and best practice.”

The BnL joins our members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating to advance digital preservation knowledge and technology.

For more information about the BnL visit: https://bnl.public.lu/ .

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

The Open Preservation Foundation is delighted to learn that veraPDF, one of our core open source digital preservation tools, has won a place in the finals for the Software Sustainability Institute’s Award for Research and Innovation.

The prestigious Digital Preservation Awards is a world-wide celebration of significant and state-of-the-art contributions to securing our digital legacy. This year the exciting process will culminate in a spectacular awards ceremony in Amsterdam, as part of an International Conference hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network and the Amsterdam Museum on World Digital Preservation Day (previously International Digital Preservation Day) on Thursday 29th November 2018.

Chair of the judges and Head of Technology for BBC Information and Archives Steve Daly said:

Year on year we receive more and more nominations from around the world, and this year was no exception. The judges had an enormous challenge deciding on a set of finalists, when the quality of all applications was so outstanding.”

Executive Director of OPF Martin Wrigley said:

I’m thrilled to see the recognition of the great work that has gone into veraPDF to make it such an essential digital preservation tool and would like to thank the Digital Preservation Awards judges and the DPC for this honour.”

Finalists for the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) Award for Research and Innovation are (in no particular order):

• ePADD, Stanford University
• veraPDF, Open Preservation Foundation on behalf of the veraPDF Consortium
• ‘Digital Curation: Contributions towards Defining the Discipline,’ Dr. Sarah Higgins – Aberystwyth University
• Flashback: Preservation of legacy digital collection, The British Library

Read more about the Digital Preservation Awards 2018 finalists

Sponsor of the Award for Research and Innovation, Neil Chue Hong of the Software Sustainability Institute said:

I am delighted to be able to share the work of our finalists. Each one demonstrates world-class innovation and research which has the potential to benefit the entire digital preservation community.”

The Digital Preservation Awards is supported by some of the leading organizations in digital preservation.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) has today published its new strategy, setting out the long-term direction for the organisation.

The strategy establishes the OPF’s position in the digital preservation landscape and guides the tasks, tools, and projects that the Foundation will address.

New core values define the Foundation’s fundamental beliefs and how the organisation conducts itself. The strategy focuses on developing the OPF reference toolset and roadmaps for the open source digital preservation tools under its stewardship. It describes the activities to build on the Foundation’s best practice and knowledge sharing programme.

Barbara Sierman, Chair of the OPF board and digital preservation consultant at the National Library of the Netherlands commented:

Our new strategy brings together all of the Foundation’s strands of work into a clear plan with practical actions and gives measures to evaluate its effectiveness. We would like to thank our members for their input which has helped to ensure it meets their needs and priorities.”

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the Open Preservation Foundation said:

We are delighted to publish the new strategy which presents our plans for the future. We have refreshed our vision and mission and encourage all organisations who share our goals to join us to help realise the strategy’s success.”

Download the OPF Strategy

https://staging.openpreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/public/OPF_Strategy_2018.pdf

Please contact becky@openpreservation.org to request printed copies.

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

About the Open Preservation Foundation

The Open Preservation Foundation is a global not-for-profit membership organisation that leads a collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools.

Founded in 2010 as the Open Planets Foundation to steward the results of EU-funded R&D, the Foundation also enables the development of best practice through interest groups, community events and training. Our vision is ‘Open sustainable digital preservation‘.

The Open Preservation Foundation is pleased to welcome the International Atomic Energy Agency Archives and Records Management Section as our latest affiliate member.

The International Atomic Energy Agency Archives and Records Management Section (IAEA) manages the Agency’s institutional memory and preserves the official records documenting its programme activities and its historical material in a variety of media. It maintains the availability and authenticity of IAEA records, providing for continuity and enabling accountability while ensuring confidentiality.

In order to ensure the accessibility, usability and digital continuity of our holdings, the IAEA is increasingly engaging in a variety of projects working towards establishing a digital long-term preservation environment.

We use a number of valuable resources provided by the OPF” explains Gabriella Ivacs, Section Head of the Archives and Records Management Section. “We attend OPF webinars and are users of the OPF’s tools, including JHOVE. It became clear that we could benefit from membership while supporting the development and sustainability of these resources”.

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF said:

We are delighted to welcome the International Atomic Energy Agency Archives to the OPF and look forward to working with them to use OPF tools and resources to help support their digital preservation infrastructure.”

The IAEA joins our members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating to advance digital preservation knowledge and technology.

For more information about the IAEA visit: https://www.iaea.org/resources/archives/.

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is pleased to welcome The National Archives of the UK as our newest charter member.

The National Archives is the official archive and publisher for the UK Government. They are the guardians of more than 1,000 years of iconic national and international documents, including the Domesday Book, Shakespeare’s will, and the Windrush passenger lists. They are expert advisers in information and records management and are a cultural, academic and heritage institution. The National Archives fulfil a leadership role for the archive sector across England and Wales and work to secure the future of physical and digital records.

John Sheridan, Digital Director of The National Archives said:

The National Archives strategy, ‘Archives Inspire’ says that digital is our biggest challenge. We are committed to working with others around the world to develop the practises and tools we all need. OPF provides a unique home for us to collaboratively develop the software and know-how we all need for the preservation of digital records.”

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF said:

We are thrilled The National Archives has joined the OPF. They developed and maintain PRONOM and DROID, which are widely used and extremely valuable to the digital preservation community. We are looking forward to working with them.”

The National Archives joins our members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating to advance digital preservation knowledge and technology.

For more information about The National Archives visit: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/.

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

Last call! There is just under a month left for institutions to take advantage of the BitCurator Consortium (BCC) and Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) discount trial membership opportunity!  We encourage those institutions that have been considering joining these communities to sign up now. Please see details below:

From 1 January 2017, members of the OPF will receive a 10% discount on membership fees when they join the BCC for a year long trial membership, and BCC members will receive a 10% discount when they join the OPF. The offer runs from one year to 31 December 2017.

The trial discounted membership provides libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions with an opportunity to experiment with membership in the BCC and OPF and leverage the knowledge, skills, and resources of their highly dynamic and active communities.  

Open Preservation Foundation

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is an international not-for-profit membership organisation that sustains technology and knowledge for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage. The Foundation provides its members with reliable solutions to the challenges of digital preservation. https://staging.openpreservation.org/

OPF’s membership comprises archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers that share a commitment to advancing digital preservation. Members steer the Foundation’s strategy and activities and benefit from exclusive or priority access to OPF interest groups, webinars, technical clinic and events, as well as support in adopting and using our open source reference toolset including JHOVE and veraPDF. Read more about the benefits of joining the OPF: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/

BitCurator Consortium

The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) is an independent, community-led membership association that serves as the host and center of administrative, user and community support for the BitCurator environment. Its purpose is to support the curation of born-digital materials through the application of open-source digital forensics tools by institutions responsible for such materials.

https://www.bitcuratorconsortium.org/

The BCC is now welcoming institutions in all sectors and nations to join as General Members. Member benefits include:

• Access to the BCC help desk
• Prioritization in future feature and enhancement requests
• Dedicated educational offerings
• Voting rights
• Eligibility to serve on the BCC Executive Council and Committees
• Service opportunities
• Community engagement and networking
• Professional development and training
• Subscription to a dedicated BCC member mailing list
• Special rates for BCC events, including the annual BitCurator User Forum

Read more about the benefits of joining the BitCurator Consortium: https://www.bitcuratorconsortium.org/join

To discuss any aspects of the offer, or the respective member benefits, please contact Sam Meister (sam@educopia.org) or Becky McGuinness (becky@openpreservation.org).

The Open Preservation Foundation welcomes Yale University Library as its newest member.

Yale University Library (YUL) is a leading academic research library that supports the mission of Yale University. Its astonishing collections range from ancient papyri and early printed books to digital collections and electronic databases using many formats including text, photographs, video, audio, data, maps, and ephemera.

Yale University’s mission statement emphasises digital preservation both for today and future generations. To support their digital information collection which is over 1 petabyte and growing, YUL are working with OPF tools and developing and implementing world-leading digital preservation tools and services. YUL intend to have scalable, extensible, dependable, robust, and sustainable systems and infrastructure to support their mission.

Euan Cochrane, Digital Preservation Manager at YUL, said:

We believe in the mission of the OPF and are excited to collaborate with other OPF members on the numerous worthy endeavors the Foundation supports. In particular, we have already begun working with the OPF on developing a digital preservation metadata portal that makes use of the open Wikidata.org database to share metadata about file formats, software, computer hardware and the relationships between them all. In addition, we make use of many of the tools the OPF supports and are pleased to be able to materially contribute to their ongoing stewardship. The OPF community provides an unsurpassed source of expertise, knowledge and experience in digital preservation and we are excited to be a contributing member to it.”

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of OPF, said:

We are delighted to welcome Yale University Library to the OPF, and particularly extending our membership numbers in the United States. We share the goals of delivering reliable and sustainable digital preservation tools and enhanced knowledge and best practice in the field. YUL are a highly active contributor to the digital preservation community and we look forward to working more closely with them.”

Yale University Library joins our members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

For more information about Yale University Library visit: http://web.library.yale.edu/.

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/. Yale University Library joins the Open Preservation Foundation through our collaboration with the BitCurator Consortium. Together we are offering a discount membership trial throughout 2017: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/membership/bcc-trial-membership/.

The Open Preservation Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment of Martin Wrigley as the Foundation’s new Executive Director.  Martin will be responsible for working with members and the Board to develop the future strategy and enhance the Foundation’s portfolio of open source digital preservation tools.

Martin brings over 30 years experience of working in the software industry, including software development, mobile telecoms and phone apps and over 20 years at Orange. He is the Executive Director of the not-for-profit Application Quality Alliance focussing on mobile App quality and testing standards, and Martin also holds several other Non-executive Director appointments.

Barbara Sierman, Chair of the OPF, said:

We are delighted to welcome Martin as our new Executive Director. His leadership experience, his fresh look at digital preservation and his technical background will be invaluable to achieving our mission to deliver shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation. We look forward to working with him to grow and develop the Foundation.”

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the OPF, said:

I am thrilled to be appointed Executive Director of the Open Preservation Foundation. This is an exciting time to join the organisation. OPF is the steward of open source tools including JHOVE and veraPDF, which are relied upon across the digital preservation community, and I’m looking forward to developing the roadmap and ensuring that OPF continues to deliver value to our members.”

About the Open Preservation Foundation

The Open Preservation Foundation is a global, not-for-profit, membership organisation that stewards and sustains open source tools and knowledge to deliver reliable solutions to the challenges of digital preservation of cultural heritage.

For more information and to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/

The Open Preservation Foundation is pleased to welcome Arcsys Software as its newest affiliate member.

Arcsys Software is a software company specialising in records management and preservation of born-digital assets. The Arcsys suite allows users to create a long-term warehouse of all digital business information in order to perpetuate assets, manage lifecycle and risks related to the regulatory compliance requirements and increase digital confidence.

Gaël Bertin, Managing Director of Arcsys Software said: “Although Arcsys software is proprietary, it is based on an open architecture to address long-term preservation concerns. Our open strategy allows customers to use Arcsys with external tools and plugins such as JHOVE and other open-source software. By supporting OPF, Arcsys would like to improve open-source tools for the benefit of the digital preservation community.”

Barbara Sierman, chair of the OPF said: “We were delighted to announce Arcsys Software as our newest member at our Annual General Meeting held on 7-8 June in Paris. It was an excellent opportunity for our members to network and discuss collaboration for the future. We are looking forward to working with them.”

Arcsys Software joins Foundation members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

For more information about Arcsys Software visit: www.arcsys-software.com.

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join.

The Open Preservation Foundation is pleased to welcome Ex Libris as its newest charter member.

Ex Libris’ Rosetta is an end-to-end digital asset management and preservation solution for libraries, archives, museums and other institutions, enabling institutions to safely and securely collect, manage, publish, deliver, and ensure longevity for digital information of many different types. With Rosetta’s unique content preservation planning module and its Format Library knowledge base, shared by the entire Rosetta community, institutions can identify format risks, evaluate mitigation alternatives, and select the best preservation actions.

As part of the Ex Libris family, Rosetta reflects Ex Libris involvement in industry standards and commitment to extensibility and open architecture. Ex Libris continually invests in supporting the community and in ensuring that its users will benefit from the latest industry and community developments.

Our membership of the Open Preservation Foundation is a natural move to further support the digital preservation community”, explains Adi Alter, Director of Product Management, Digital Solutions at Ex Libris. “Rosetta itself is based on an open architecture that allows customers to easily use Rosetta with external tools and plugins such as JHOVE and other open-source software. By supporting OPF, we can further improve open-source tools for the benefit of all

Barbara Sierman, chair of OPF comments: “We are delighted that Ex Libris are helping to support the digital preservation community. They made a valuable contribution to the JHOVE online hack day in April and we are pleased to formalise our relationship and to working together.”

Ex Libris joins Foundation members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

For more information about Ex Libris Rosetta visit: http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/RosettaOverview.

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

Barbara Sierman has been appointed as the new Chair of the Open Preservation Foundation.

The Foundation’s Board of Directors voted to elect Barbara as Chair following her nomination at their February Board meeting. Barbara, Digital Preservation Manager at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, succeeds Dr. Ross King, Austrian Institute of Technology, who has held the role for three years.

The Board have also established a new role of Deputy Chair and elected Dr. Peter May, British Library, to this position.

Barbara said:

I am very pleased to be chosen for this role. I would like to thank Ross for his valuable work as chair. I look forward to working with the Board and members to help the Foundation in its mission to sustain technology and knowledge for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage.”

Ross said:

I am confident that Barbara and Peter have both the experience and initiative to guide the Open Preservation Foundation. I will continue to support them as a member of the Board, and know that the staff and the membership will do so as well.”

Building on the existing strong ties between our organisations, the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) and BitCurator Consortium (BCC) are pleased to announce a discount trial membership opportunity that offers its members a 10% discount off annual membership fees.

From 1 January 2017, members of the OPF will receive a 10% discount on membership fees when they join the BCC for a year long trial membership, and BCC members will receive a 10% discount when they join the OPF. The offer runs from one year to 31 December 2017.

Ross King, Chair of OPF, Austrian Institute of Technology said:

The OPF and BCC share a common goal to provide reliable, open source software to support the preservation of digital objects for the long-term. We welcome applications from existing members, as well new organisations who are interested in joining a growing community benefiting from open source tools and resources.”

Matthew Farrell, President of BCC, Duke University said:

We are delighted to build upon our existing partnership – the BCC and OPF have co-hosted events and webinars, and OPF has carried out code quality reviews for BCC software. Both organisations operate as not-for-profits with funding going directly to software development, outreach and training materials.”

The trial discounted membership provides libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions with an opportunity to experiment with membership in the BCC and OPF and leverage the knowledge, skills, and resources of their highly dynamic and active communities.

About

BitCurator Consortium

The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) is an independent, community-led membership association that serves as the host and center of administrative, user and community support for the BitCurator environment. Its purpose is to support the curation of born-digital materials through the application of open-source digital forensics tools by institutions responsible for such materials.

https://www.bitcuratorconsortium.org/

The BCC is now welcoming institutions in all sectors and nations to join as General Members. Member benefits include:

• Access to the BCC help desk
• Prioritisation in future feature and enhancement requests
• Dedicated educational offerings
• Voting rights
• Eligibility to serve on the BCC Executive Council and Committees
• Service opportunities
• Community engagement and networking
• Professional development and training
• Subscription to a dedicated BCC member mailing list
• Special rates for BCC events, including the annual BitCurator User Forum

Read more about the benefits of joining the BitCurator Consortium: https://www.bitcuratorconsortium.org/join

Open Preservation Foundation

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is an international not-for-profit membership organisation that sustains technology and knowledge for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage. The Foundation provides its members with reliable solutions to the challenges of digital preservation. https://staging.openpreservation.org/

OPF’s membership comprises archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers that share a commitment to advancing digital preservation. Members steer the Foundation’s strategy and activities and benefit from exclusive or priority access to OPF interest groups, webinars, technical clinic and events, as well as support in adopting and using our open source software including JHOVE and veraPDF. Read more about the benefits of joining the OPF: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/

To discuss any aspects of the offer, or the respective member benefits, please contact Sam Meister (sam@educopia.org) or Becky McGuinness (becky@openpreservation.org).

The Open Preservation Foundation and nestor have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the aim to facilitate discussion between the two organisations and to co-operate on activities to promote digital preservation.

Sabrina Kistner Hidalgo, Head of the nestor Office said: “nestor and the OPF share central goals such as digital preservation advocacy, knowledge exchange and disseminating best practices. We are happy that we have found a way to express these shared goals with the Memorandum of Understanding.“

Joachim Jung, Executive Director of the OPF said: “Building partnerships supports the Foundation’s strategic goals. This alliance will help us to reach a more local audience while supporting the nestor network to share their expertise across language barriers.”

About

nestor
nestor is the German competence network for digital preservation. Libraries, archives, museums and leading experts work together in nestor to ensure the long-term preservation and accessibility of digital sources. nestor is a cooperation association including partners from different fields, but all connected in some way with the subject of “digital preservation”. http://www.langzeitarchivierung.de/

Open Preservation Foundation
The Open Preservation Foundation is an international not-for-profit membership organisation that sustains technology and knowledge for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage. The Foundation provides its members with reliable solutions to the challenges of digital preservation. https://staging.openpreservation.org/

The Open Preservation Foundation is pleased to announce that the National Library of Norway has become its latest charter member. The National Library of Norway collects all media types published in Norway, including radio and television broadcasts, films, music, and the Norwegian part of the Internet. Within the coming 20–30 years, they plan to digitize their complete collection. 90% of all books ever published in Norway, 30% of all newspapers and nearly 100% of all recorded radio programs from the largest and oldest radio broadcast station in Norway are already digitised.

In January 2016, a revised legal deposit law was passed in Norway, which includes the right to do full domain Internet harvest and the legal deposit of the digital masters for paper publications. With a digital collection of 5.2 petabytes of unique data, growing at a rate of 1 petabyte per year, it is vital for the National Library to have a trustworthy solution for digital preservation. They are looking at preservation in terms of 1000 years.

Svein Arne Solbakk, Director for Digital Library Development, National Library of Norway commented:

We have been working in digital preservation for more than 15 years. In this time, the library has collaborated with several other national libraries on issues related to digital preservation. We are now starting work on revising our digital preservation policies and practice. We consider OPF a valuable arena to discuss digital preservation with other institutions experiencing the same challenges, and to learn valuable lessons from how the other institutions have implemented their digital preservation”.

Joachim Jung, Executive Director, Open Preservation Foundation commented:

We are very pleased to welcome the National Library of Norway as our newest member, and were happy they could join us at our Annual General Meeting in June. Fostering collaboration between our members is a priority for the Foundation. We are fascinated by their ambitious digitisation project, and look forward to working with them”.

The National Library of Norway joins OPF members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

To read more about the National Library of Norway visit: http://www.nb.no/

For more information about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

The Open Preservation Foundation is delighted to welcome Arkivum as its newest affiliate member.

Arkivum has a successful track record of delivering digital preservation solutions to some of the leading organisations in the UK, Europe and the USA. With both on-site and cloud-based managed digital preservation and big data archiving offerings, Arkivum is able to meet a wide range of needs, drivers and requirements. Working with libraries, museums, archives and higher education institutions, Arkivum also provides consultancy, data management resources and expertise to get organisations of all sizes onto the digital preservation ladder.

Steve Mackey, VP Sales – Education and Heritage, Arkivum comments:

Working in the area of digital preservation, it was a natural step for Arkivum to join the OPF. As we continue to extend our reach in the digital heritage and higher education sectors, being able to work alongside, and within, OPF initiatives, will bring enormous benefits to our business, and crucially, confidence with our clients”.

Joachim Jung, Executive Director, Open Preservation Foundation comments:

We are very pleased to welcome Arkivum to our membership. It strengthens our connection with industry, and brings providers and users together under one roof. Arkivum’s solutions make extensive use of open standards, open specifications and open source, which aligns with the Foundation’s commitment to openness.”

Arkivum joins Foundation members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

For more information about Arkivum visit: http://arkivum.com/.

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

We are pleased to announce that our 2014-2016 Annual Report has been published.

The report looks back on the activities and achievements undertaken by the Foundation over the past two years. Highlights include:

• Launch of strategic plan 2015-18, new name, brand and website
• New membership and software supporter model
• Technology: stewardship and sustainability
• Knowledge: webinars and interest groups
• New Alliances and community contributions
• Project summaries
• An introduction to the year ahead

Download

OPF Annual Report 2014-16

A limited number of printed copies are available upon request.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) and the Nationale Coalitie Digitale Duurzaamheid (NCDD) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to build a collaborative partnership to address digital preservation.

Signed by Joachim Jung, Executive Director of the OPF, and Marcel Ras, Executive Director of the NCDD, the MOU sets out how the two organisations will work together. It facilitates the OPF and NCDD to share planning documentation, to co-operate on educational activities and to work together to further digital preservation software sustainability.

Marcel Ras, Program Manager, NCDD says: “The NCDD and OPF share many of the same goals – to ensure long term access to digital files across different sectors. Collaboration is a key part of achieving this. The memorandum of understanding with OPF is an important step forward for international collaboration.”

Joachim Jung, Executive Director, OPF says: “The partnership with the NCDD underpins our commitment to expand the sustainability of digital preservation knowledge and software. We are looking forward to working with the NCDD and bringing new value to our respective memberships and the wider community.”

About

The Open Preservation Foundation is an international not-for-profit membership organisation that sustains technology and knowledge for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage. They provide their members with reliable solutions to the challenges of digital preservation. https://staging.openpreservation.org/

The Nationale Coalitie Digitale Duurzaamheid was founded in 2008 by a group of public organisations which count the management of digital data collections among their primary tasks (see NCDD partners). The NCDD’s aim is to collaboratively create a cross-domain organisational and technical infrastructure guaranteeing the long-term usability of digital files. http://www.ncdd.nl/

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is pleased to welcome the National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal) as its latest affiliate member.

Founded in 1796, the National Library of Portugal (NLP) holds the largest historical and cultural bibliographic collection in the country with over 3.5 million items from a wide range of genres, both in print and manuscript.

NLP acts as the National Bibliography Agency responsible for legal deposit for the Portuguese National Bibliography, the National Union Online Catalogue – PORBASE, established in 1987, and for the National Digital Library, launched in 2001. Since 2001, the NLP has been developing its digitization programme and over 26,000 documents (2.5 million images) are currently available through the National Digital Library web site (http://bnd.bn.pt/).

We are very pleased that the National Library of Portugal has joined the OPF.” said Dr. Ross King, Chair of the OPF. “This demonstrates their commitment to the digital preservation community and we look forward to working with them to support their mission to preserve Portugal’s digital cultural and scientific heritage.”

Helena Patrício, Director of Special Collections Services at NLP commented “By joining the OPF we hope to benefit from up-to-date knowledge, expertise and tools that will enable the National Library to deal more efficiently with major digital preservation issues such as digital asset preservation, preservations costs and technological obsolescence management.”

The NLP joins OPF members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

To read more about the NLP visit: http://www.bnportugal.pt/

For more information about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

We are pleased to announce that Joachim Jung has been named Executive Director for the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF). Joachim will take up the post on December 1, 2015 and will lead OPF in its mission to sustain technology and knowledge for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage.

Joachim has a long term interest in open communities, and brings nearly 10 years experience of working in cultural heritage organisations. He was Project Manager for the EU FP7 SCAPE (Scalable Preservation Environments) project from 2011-2014, overseeing the development and delivery of scalable, open source services for digital preservation. 

On behalf of the Board, I am very pleased to welcome Joachim as the Executive Director of the OPF. We received a number of strong applications from around the world,” said Dr. Ross King, Chair of the OPF. “Joachim has a keen insight into the challenges of digital preservation, complemented by excellent management skills. We look forward to working with him to continue to strengthen our value to our members and the community.”

Joachim Jung, Executive Director of OPF, said “Having watched and helped the OPF take its first steps in the SCAPE project, I am delighted to be given the chance now to guide the foundation to build on its role as a steward of high quality open source solutions for the digital preservation community.”

Joachim takes on the role of Executive Director from Ed Fay who returned to the London School of Economics in a new role as Head of Digital Scholarship and Innovation in October.

The Open Preservation Foundation is delighted to welcome The University of Alabama Libraries as our latest charter member.

The University of Alabama (UA) Libraries supports academic, research, and service programs with a variety of creative, innovative, and practical resources designed to meet the needs of a growing, dynamic campus.

UA Libraries is widely recognized for their innovative services and quality reference materials. A system of five separate discipline-related libraries, the Libraries provides both traditional print collections and cutting-edge technology for students and faculty to conduct research and enhance their educational experience.

The UA Libraries digitally preserves collections of rare and unique research resources housed in the Libraries’ Division of Special Collections.

The University of Alabama Libraries is interested in digital preservation of both digitized and born digital special collections, university records, and research data,” explained Jody DeRidder, Head of Metadata and Digital Services, UA Libraries.

OPF is a leader in this area and by joining OPF we believe we will be able to leverage the collective wisdom of the OPF community. Additionally, OPF’s stewardship of important digital preservation-related tools such as JHOVE is extremely important for digital preservationists and we wanted to help support these efforts,” said Edward Corrado, Associate Dean, Library Technology Planning and Policy, UA Libraries.

We are very pleased to welcome The University of Alabama Libraries to our membership,” comments Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. “They have a unique digital collection and have been developing digital preservation practices for some time. Their knowledge and experience will enhance the shared activities of our members and we look forward to collaborating with them”.

UA Libraries joins OPF members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

For more information about The University of Alabama Libraries visit: https://www.lib.ua.edu/.

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) is delighted to welcome Preservica as its newest charter member.

Preservica has over a decade of expertise in digital preservation, investing in many research initiatives as well as being a well-respected member of several international collaborations with academia, archives, libraries and corporations. Today, Preservica’s on-premise and cloud hosted digital preservation and access solutions are used by leading institutions and organisations around the world.

Preservica is a long term supporter of open source software’ explains Martin Springell, Product Director of Preservica. ‘Our digital preservation solutions utilise a number of open source components, including JHOVE, and we see collaborating with OPF as a great opportunity to make a more structured contribution to open source tool development and stewardship for the digital preservation community.’

We’re particularly pleased that Preservica has chosen to join the Open Preservation Foundation and take a prominent role in ensuring the sustainability of open source digital preservation software’ comments Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. ‘They bring a wealth of industry expertise, gained over many years of providing solutions to institutions of all sizes, which will strengthen our community activities to progress digital preservation technology and share knowledge openly for the benefit of all.’

Preservica joins OPF members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

For more information about Preservica visit: http://preservica.com/

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

We are delighted to welcome Artefactual Systems Inc. as the newest affiliate member of the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF); the first since we launched our new membership model in June 2015.

Artefactual Systems is the lead developer of three open-source software tools, Archivematica (https://www.archivematica.org/) for digital preservation, AtoM (https://www.accesstomemory.org/) for archival description and online access, and Binder (http://binder.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) for digital repository management.

Artefactual’s affiliate contribution will focus on the development, maintenance and public release management of the Format Identification for Digital Objects (FIDO) software tool. FIDO is included in Archivematica, but can also be used as a stand-alone command line tool or incorporated into other digital preservation systems.

“By becoming an affiliate member of the Open Preservation Foundation, Artefactual hopes to contribute to and benefit from the well-being of the open-source ecosystem of tools and services that we believe is essential to supporting digital preservation in the heritage community” explains Evelyn McLellan, President of Artefactual Systems Inc.

“We are delighted to welcome Artefactual Systems to our membership” comments Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. “They bring a wealth of experience in open source development and will be carrying out work on FIDO, a file format identification tool, which benefits the whole digital preservation community”.

Artefactual Systems joins OPF members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

For more information about Artefactual Systems visit: https://www.artefactual.com/

To find out more about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

About

Artefactual Systems
Artefactual Systems is a Canadian-based company which provides consulting, software development, technical support and hosting services to heritage institutions around the world.

Open Preservation Foundation
The OPF is an international non-profit membership organisation sustaining technology and knowledge for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage, providing its members with reliable solutions to the challenges of digital preservation.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF)  has introduced a new membership model to make participation more accessible to all organisations with a commitment to ensuring long term access to digital content. Alongside the new membership model, we have also established a software supporter model to ensure the sustainability and future development of open source software tools in its stewardship.

Over the last year the OPF has established a solid foundation for ensuring the sustainability of digital preservation technology and knowledge’ explains Dr. Ross King, Chair of the OPF Board. ‘Our new strategic plan was introduced in November 2014 along with community surveys to establish the current state of the art. We developed our annual plan in consultation with our members and added JHOVE to our growing software portfolio. The new membership and software supporter models are the next steps towards realising our vision and mission.’

We are an international not-for-profit organisation’ adds Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. ‘We carry out a range of activities to meet our members’ priorities but we also support a number of digital preservation services and tools which are open to the whole community. These all require time and resources to sustain. It is only through commitment and contributions from our members and supporters that we are able to continue our work to sustain digital preservation technology and knowledge. We look forward to welcoming new collaborators who share this commitment to advancing digital preservation.’

The new membership model opens participation to organisations of all sizes. The membership tiers are based on the annual operating budget of your organisation. Membership is available in two categories: Charter and Affiliate. Charter members steer our strategy and annual planning. They also benefit from exclusive or priority access to our interest groups, training and events, and support in adopting and maintaining our open source software products. Affiliate members have access to the outputs of our activities and may choose to contribute effort in lieu of subscription fees to further digital preservation for the benefit of the community.

The software supporter model allows organisations to support individual digital preservation software products and ensure their ongoing sustainability and maintenance. We are launching support for JHOVE based on its broad adoption and need for active stewardship. It is also a component in several leading commercial digital preservation solutions. While it remains fully open source, supporters can steer our stewardship and maintenance activities and receive varying levels of technical support and training.

For more information about becoming an OPF member or software supporter visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/

The archive of OPF webinar recordings is now available to members. (login required).

They cover a range of different digital preservation topics. We have organised them in four categories:

• Preservation in Practice
• From the Toolbox
• Community Projects
• Open Source with OPF

Members can select webinar topics and receive priority booking.

We will continue to add new webinar recordings as they become available.

In February the JHOVE format validation tool was transferred to OPF stewardship. We have now completed our initial review of JHOVE, and have identified all of the resources that we will maintain or preserve.

The report is available on our new JHOVE product page, along with an overview of current activity and links to the source code, documentation and downloads which have been transferred to our GitHub repository.

The main objective of our work to date has been to establish a firm foundation for future changes based on agile software development best practises.

A further technical evaluation will be published in April that will also outline options for possible future development and maintenance tasks.

We have established two new interest groups in response to feedback from our members: documents and emulation.

The purpose of our interest groups is to facilitate communication and collaboration on a specific digital preservation theme or topic. The topics are selected by our members, and the groups are led by a member organisation.

The interest groups will bring together members with common interests and expertise to share experiences and advance knowledge and technology in a particular area of digital preservation. By bringing participants together, we aim to reduce duplication of effort and create hubs of information on specific topics. Where appropriate, participation can be made available to the community at large with agreement from the group.

Activities will be hosted in dedicated working spaces on the OPF wiki, and final publications or outputs will be made available through the website.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) has started the process of taking over stewardship of JHOVE, the widely-used open source digital preservation tool.

JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment) provides functions to perform format-specific identification, validation, and characterisation of digital objects. It was originally developed by Harvard Library and JSTOR in 2003.

OPF will be working with Portico, a member organisation, to carry out the transfer. The JHOVE project, comprising source code and documentation, will move to the OPF software portfolio which will provide a sustainable home. OPF will put continuous integration in place with testing and reporting in line with the OPF Software Maturity Model. This will facilitate development and release of patches and new modules. Portico will be contributing code improvements that they currently use internally as part of this process.

The findings from our member survey show that JHOVE is the most important digital preservation tool to our members,” explains Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. “Our adoption of JHOVE is a practical example of our strategic priority to build confidence in currently available tools and approaches.”

OPF will be consulting with its members and the community in the coming months to gather requirements and roadmap future development to ensure that JHOVE is robust and actively maintained.

We are happy to see JHOVE transition to a community-supported model through the OPF,” says Andrea Goethals, Manager of Digital Preservation and Repository Services at Harvard Library. “We think that this is an important step towards sustaining the core digital preservation tools many of our organisations have come to rely on.”

Portico is very happy to see JHOVE formally established, with JHOVE2, within a sustainable framework for community source,” says Sheila Morrissey, Senior Researcher at Portico. “We look forward to sharing the enhancements and extensions we have developed with JHOVE’s very extensive community of practice and use.”

We’re very pleased to see this transfer of stewardship responsibility for JHOVE to the OPF,” says Stephen Abrams, Associate Director of the University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library. “It will ensure the continuity of maintenance, enhancement, and availability between the original JHOVE system and its successor JHOVE2, both key infrastructural components in wide use throughout the digital library community.”

I’m very glad to see that JHOVE, which I supported for years, will continue to be in good hands.” comments Gary McGath, original developer and active maintainer of JHOVE.

JHOVE2, an open source digital preservation tool that carries out format-aware characterisation of digital objects, has already been moved to opf-labs in the OPF GitHub portfolio. As with JHOVE, OPF will be stewarding the software in line with its maturity model and coordinating roadmapping and future development activities.

About

Harvard Library
http://library.harvard.edu/

Portico
http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/

University of California Curation Center
http://www.cdlib.org/uc3/

Gary McGath
http://www.garymcgath.com/

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) and the PDF Association (PDFA) have today signed an agreement to formally recognise their on-going collaborative partnership.

Signed by Olaf Drümmer, Chairman of the PDFA and Ed Fay, Executive Director of the OPF, the agreement aims to enhance the effectiveness of their respective activities by sharing access to one another’s interest groups, working groups and planning documentation.

‘We have worked closely with the PDF Association over the past year,’ explains Ed Fay. ‘Olaf Drümmer was the keynote speaker at our event last year ‘Preserving PDF: identify, validate, repair’, and we’re collaborating with them again on a project right now,’ he said.

‘The PDFA and OPF have complementary areas of expertise in a variety of areas, and have already developed a successful working relationship’ commented Duff Johnson, PDF Association Executive Director. The Agreement reflects our commitment to continue our collaboration,’ said Johnson.

About the PDFA

Founded in 2006 as the PDF/A Competence Center, the PDF Association exists to promote the adoption and implementation of International Standards for PDF technology. Read more.

Website: www.pdfa.org

We are very pleased to announce that the National Library of Latvia (Latvijas Nacionālā bibliotēka, NLB) has joined the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) as our newest charter member.

The NLB preserves both physical and born digital printed material produced in Latvia, and has been digitizing their collections for the last 15 years. They have developed a digital object management system that currently holds about 50 digital collections of different sizes and types of material including images, maps, sound and video recordings.

‘We have joined the OPF to share and receive expertise on the most recent advances in digital preservation’ explains Artūrs Žogla, Head of Digital Library at NLB. ‘We look forward to collaborating with other OPF members that develop long-term digital preservation systems, as well as contributing to and adopting best practice for long-term digital preservation’

‘This is a great start to the year’ comments Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. ‘We are delighted to have another national institution join to contribute their experience to the community. We are looking forward to welcoming the NLB into the OPF membership and working together to carry out our forthcoming programme of activities that will deliver against our new strategic plan’.

The NLB joins OPF members from archives, libraries, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation.

To read more about the NLB visit: https://www.lnb.lv/.

For more information about the benefits of becoming an OPF member and how to join visit: https://staging.openpreservation.org/about/join/.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) has launched an online survey to assess the current state-of-the-art in digital preservation practices. The survey explores the adoption of digital preservation approaches and technology.

Both the findings and data from the survey will be published openly; the findings will enable peer institutions to benchmark their practice with others, and the data will allow others to carry out their own analysis of the results. However, the information in both the findings and data will be fully anonymised so that individual organisations cannot be identified.

We are interested to hear from a broad range of institution types and sizes to allow analysis of trends across the sector.

‘We recently ran a similar survey among our members to identity shared priorities and inform our strategic planning’ explains Ed Fay, OPF Executive Director.
 
‘The community survey will help to build a picture of the current digital preservation landscape and to raise awareness of effective tools and approaches that are being used in institutions around the world. The results will focus where OPF can support the community and foster open collaboration’.

About the survey
There are 20 questions in the survey. It should take approximately 20 minutes to complete.

We ask that you only provide one response per organisation. We have put together a printable guidance document to explain the purpose and format of each question, should you wish to consult with others.

Guidance document
OPF Community Digital Preservation Survey Guidance Notes

Survey
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/opf-digital-preservation-community-survey-2014.

The closing date for the survey is Friday 23 January 2015.

Please do pass the survey links and information on to contacts in your network. Help us to create an open account of the current state of digital preservation for the community.

Announced at the ‘SUCCEED in Digitisation, Spreading Excellence’ conference at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) and IMPACT Centre of Competence in Digitisation (IMPACT) have signed an Agreement of Alliance to strengthen their collaboration and enhance their respective membership benefits.

‘This Agreement supports our strategic plan 2015-18’ comments Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. ‘The Advocacy and Alliances strand aims to promote synergies in the development of digital practices and technology around the world. We are looking forward to working more closely with IMPACT and aligning our activities to add value to both our memberships’.

The Agreement commits the two organisations to sharing resources and delivering at least one event each year to bring together expertise in digital preservation and text digitisation.

About IMPACT
IMPACT is an international, not-for-profit membership organisation which make text digitisation better, faster and cheaper by providing online expertise and access to tools for all parts of the digitisation workflow.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) today launches its new strategy for 2015-18. It comprises three core strands: Technology, Knowledge, Advocacy and Alliances.

‘This is a new chapter for the Foundation’, explains Dr. Ross King, Chair of the OPF. ‘The strategic plan has been adopted by the Board of Directors after consultation with the membership and we believe it underpins the OPF’s vision to provide shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation’.

‘The new website supports our strategy which sets out our priorities and describes the benefits we provide to our members, and the open digital preservation community’, adds Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. ‘We recently changed our name to the Open Preservation Foundation, and we are excited to reveal our new brand as we launch the website’.

The new website has been designed to provide a better user experience with improved navigation and functionality, following design and testing involving OPF members and the digital preservation community.

Reflecting the strands of the strategic plan, we invite you to explore the Knowledge section to access our blog which attracts international contributions on digital preservation case studies and tool development, as well as read our latest news and browse our community events calendar. We have introduced new content for online training and interest groups which will be further developed over time.

The Technology section sets out our open source principles and practices and showcases our digital preservation products and services. We have added a selection of corpora for testing tools to evaluate their performance.

Learn more about our projects and meet the members, board and staff in Our Organisation, and download the strategic plan 2015-18 and annual reports. As the new strategy comes in to effect we will be adding exclusive content for our members.

Users with existing accounts will be asked to reset their password when first logging in to the new website, but they will be able to add new content once this is complete. At this time we are also refreshing our infrastructure set up. The OPF wiki knowledge base will be moving to the latest version of Confluence in the coming weeks.

We welcome feedback on the new website. Please contact becky(at)openpreservation(dot)org with your comments.

Download the strategic plan 2015-18.

About the Open Preservation Foundation

The OPF is an international membership organisation sustaining technology and knowledge for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage, providing its members with reliable solutions to the challenges of digital preservation.

We are delighted to welcome the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) as our latest affiliate member.

‘PSNC brings new expertise and tools to the OPF membership’, explained Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. ‘They have developed dArceo, a long-term preservation system (http://dingo.psnc.pl/darceo/) which is already used by a number of institutions in Poland to preserve their digital content. As part of their membership contribution they will publicise the service as an open source package. In addition, PSNC will submit improvements to the FITS (http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/fits) code base, a tool which is widely used by both OPF members and the wider community’.

‘As we speak about long-term preservation, our long-term goal is to improve PSNC's excellence in the field and share our expertise and tools with the preservation community’ said Tomasz Parkoła, long-term preservation specialist, and member of PSNC’s Digital Libraries Team. ‘We believe that OPF can help us bring this to reality, by providing an excellent collaboration and networking environment. We are especially looking forward to sharing knowledge, creating new initiatives, investigating new ideas and running new projects. Our main focus is obviously on research and development activities."

The Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center is a public ICT research and development institution working on broad range of topics, including network, storage, computing, applications and network services. It has been active in the long-term preservation and archiving domain for several years.

PSNC becomes the 19th member of Open Planets joining libraries, archives, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared approaches to digital preservation.

Many of the tools and practises developed for the digital forensics field can be integrated into digital preservation techniques. This is particularly true regarding:

• processes for securing, analysing, and appraising material prior to ingest into a repository or digital archive.
• donated personal digital archives, where physical hardware and media are acquired, rather than digital content.

Digital Forensic best practises deal with:

• Acquisition: activities to secure and preserve the state of physical and digital evidence. These include disk imaging, metadata creation, and producing authentic copies for examination. These techniques can also be used to “secure and preserve the state” of physical media and digital content.
• Examination: a rigorous, systematic examination of data to locate information of interest to the investigation. Methods here include duplicate detection, identifying system files from Operating Systems, programs, etc., detecting encryption, detecting personal data, and time line analysis. These techniques can complement existing characterisation methods in the digital preservation field.
• Analysis: an often manual analysis of extracted data, evaluating it for relevance to the investigation. A digital preservation practitioner’s activities might include assessing the relevance digital material to the collection, finding or removing personal information, or creating a content profile.

These forensic tools and methods combined with established digital preservation tools and techniques can provide a pre-ingest workflow that:

• secures data at the point of acquisition.
• allows tools to be run on imaged copies protecting the source media and data.
• provides the metadata required to make informed decisions regarding the content.

What those decisions are in practise depends on variable factors including the type of access to be provided, permissions granted by the rights holder, and institutional policy.

One scenario might be that a subset of content is extracted from the image and ingested into a repository. Access to this material could be provided through an emulated environment, the choice of environment and rendering software informed through metadata gathered during the pre-ingest process.

When requirements and permissions allow however a potentially exciting emulation opportunity may present itself. It is possible to virtualise some of disk images created from the original media. The image must contain a supported working operating system and the process isn’t certain to be successful. When this approach works access to the material can be provided through an emulated version of the original machine, which may have belonged to an author or researcher. This article in The Atlantic, and this one from The New York Times describe a nice example of the use of these or similar techniques to preserve the personal digital archive of Salman Rushdie.

The OPF is hosting two hackathons focussing on these themes:

• 15-17 May, Copenhagen, Denmark
• 3-5 June, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

We are pleased to welcome two new affiliate organisations to our membership: Portico, a digital preservation service, and the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a number one ranked school in the United States.

The first OPF webinar ‘Understanding the Value of Preservation Data’ by Dr. David Tarrant, will take place on Wednesday 26 September at 15.00 BST / 16.00 CET.

This webinar will demonstrate techniques for ensuring quality and maturity of preservation data.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• List and describe a number of existing sources of open data.
• Compare the techniques each use to provide data and assess the quality of such data, noting how this links to maturity.
• Recall the 5-stars of open data and evaluate how each applies to a number of digital preservation case studies.
• Explain a number of important steps in Data Curation and illustrate how each relates to other techniques for publishing open data.

We plan to hold webinars on a monthly basis, focusing on a range of topics realting to digital preservation and long term access. They will be listed in our events pages (https://staging.openpreservation.org/events and announced in our mailing list and via Twitter.

Only OPF members can attend the live webinars and can participate in discussions and ask questions. However, the webinars will be recorded and released at a later date.

The next OPF Hackathon – A Practical Approach to Preservation Systems – will focus on preservation workflows and systems. It will consider a large number of widely available tools that are being used both by the community and in industry.

With a focus on end-to-end digital preservation, this workshop will look at the various tools that can be used at all stages of the digital preservation process and outline how these can be used in simplistic workflows. 

Practitioners are asked to bring along their problematic digital objects and/or collections and aid the developers to create real solutions that work for you. 

This hackathon is perhaps more open ended than previous workshops and focuses on any part of a preservation system is encouraged. However, it is hoped that people can transfer their solutions to others by utilising small tools to solve a real problem.

It builds on the approach of previous OPF hackathons and the project events in which OPF has been involved (AQuA, SPRUCE and SCAPE). A number of blogs have been written about the events. The following examples give an insight as to what to expect in a hackathon: http://www.staging.openpreservation.org/blogs/2012-02-20-use-cases-database-archiving, http://www.staging.openpreservation.org/blogs/2012-04-25-mashing-it-across-border-spruce, http://www.staging.openpreservation.org/blogs/2011-10-14-report-attending-practical-tools-digital-preservation-hackathon

To see the agenda and to find out more visit the OPF wiki event page:http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/KB/2012-05-21+OPF+Hackathon+-+A+Practical+Approach+to+Preservation+Systems

To register visit: http://opfhackathonmontpellier.eventbrite.co.uk 

The OPF is hosting two hackathons events in Cologne (31 August – 2 September) and York (27 – 29 September) and invites digital preservation practitioners and developers to register now.

Cologne Hackathon University at Cologne 31 August – 2 September

We have put an agenda on the OPF wiki and invite you to contribute comments and feedback at: http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/KB/Cologne+Hackathon+31+August+-+2+September+2011

Topics include:

• Results evaluation framework (REF)
• PLATO training
• Format identification tools training
• Database archiving requirements

You can register at: http://opf-hackathon-cologne.eventbrite.com   

Practical Tools for Digital Preservation: A Hackathon  York DPC Offices 27 September – 29 September

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the OPF are co-hosting a hackathon which aims to bring together digital preservation practitioners, collection curators and technical experts to present problematic digital collections, articulate requirements for their assessment, and then apply tools to automate the detection and identification of the content issues. It builds on the success of the AQuA project (http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/AQuA/Home).

For more information and to register visit: http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/34-hackathon?xref=33

In November 2010 JISC joined the OPF as a charter member. Its role has been to foster interest from the higher education sector in developing digital preservation tools and technologies. The OPF and JISC will work together to contribute to establishing a curriculum for teaching digital preservation practices and to advance research and development. JISC’s Digital Infrastructure Programme Manager, Neil Grindley, has blogged about why JISC joined the OPF here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/and-the-answer-is/.

JISC and the OPF are offering the opportunity for a group of UK universities to become affiliate members of the OPF. These institutions can collaborate with digital preservation experts and help to address the challenges of long term access to digital information.

The OPF and JISC are pleased to welcome the following universities as new affiliate members:

University of Southampton
University of Oxford
University of Portsmouth
University of Cambridge
King’s College London (Centre for e-Research)
University of Glasgow (Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute)
Digital Curation Centre

For more information about joining this affiliate group please contact Neil Grindley (n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk), or Bram van der Werf (bram@openplanetsfoundation.com).

There have been some excellent discussions on the OPF blogs about a range of issues, and we would like to thank those of you who have contributed to that. This has illustrated the incredible amount of knowledge in the community about the digital preservation challenges we face, and also about potential solutions.

Collaboration & Consolidation
We have set up a Practitioners’ requirements wiki on the OPF-Labs service, called ‘What We Need’. Our aim is to populate the wiki with this knowledge, facilitate discussions about preservation problems and outline requirements for digital preservation tools. By working collaboratively, the community can refine these requirements to create solid use cases for development work. (See http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/REQ/Home). We have added a wishlist to get discussions started and have provided a couple of examples of problem descriptions, requirements and use cases within some of the topics.

Prize
To celebrate the OPF’s first birthday on 1 June, we will be awarding the person who provides the best contribution to the wiki/website with a Samsung Galaxy Player.

Email lists
We have set up three new email lists that OPF website account holders can subscribe to:

The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) will host a round-table discussion at iPres 2010. It will take place on Wednesday 22 September at 17:30 – 19.00 at the Austrian National Library.

Digital preservation practitioners are invited to join us to:

• Learn how Planets tools and services are being implemented in national libraries and archives.

• Find out how the OPF plans to sustain the results of the Planets project.

• Discuss how tools and services might be developed in the future.

• Meet the Executive Director and members of the OPF.

Refreshments and conference materials will be provided.

We hope to see you in Vienna!

For information about the iPres Conference visit: http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010/.

Planets is delighted to announce that Bram van der Werf has been appointed as Executive Director of the Open Planets Foundation. Bram will take up his appointment on 1st June 2010. 

As Executive Director of the newly established Open Planets Foundation, Bram will work closely with the Board of Directors and members to define and deliver the organisation’s strategic plan. He will be responsible for ensuring that the Foundation maintains and further develops the innovative digital preservation services that members need, and also for delivering a long-term plan to ensure the sustainability of these services.

Regarding his appointment, Bram said: “I am delighted to have joined the Open Planets Foundation at this exciting time, and am pleased to be able to contribute to the important and growing area of digital preservation. I was first exposed to the Planets approach when I previously acted as a reviewer of the Planets Project for the European Commission. This project has achieved notable successes and provides a solid platform on which to build tools and services to meet the needs of the Digital Preservation Community. I look forward to using my experience to help the Open Planets Foundation develop its strategy and services, and to working with OPF members to support their digital preservation needs.”

Bram brings extensive technical and management experience to his role at the Open Planets Foundation. He was the Technical Director at Europeana, responsible for moving it from a project and prototype basis to a robust production quality service. Prior to his appointment at Europeana he was a management consultant expert/advisor on Software Development Best Practices for Open Source and Collaborative Technologies. He has previously held Director and Senior Management positions in the Software and Services Industry with companies such as Rational Software, Progress Software and IBM Application Management Services. Bram has many years experience in managing large scale projects and organizations on the edge of users, technology practitioners, and in implementing state of the art technologies.

• Unlike parchment and paper, digital data has a life span of years not millennia 
• 3 billion euros worth of vital data is already being lost every year in the EU alone
• New international consortium known as the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) formed to tackle preservation challenge

Covering everything from medical records to family photos, current estimates suggest that there are already exists over 100Gb of data for every individual person on the planet.  With data creation set to double every 18 months, failure to adequately address the challenge of preserving this material therefore represents a major financial, intellectual and cultural risk.  With the existing four year European Commission Planets project achieving completion, a new not-for-profit consortium known as the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) has been given the go-ahead to build on existing efforts and continue to tackle the constantly evolving long term digital preservation challenge. 

Between 2006 and 2010 the Planets project successfully delivered a number of practical digital preservations tools to assist organisations with assessing their preservation needs and provide the necessary technical solutions – http://www.planets-project.eu/.  Hosted by the British Library, the OPF aims to expand on this work and develop the international digital preservation community further, encouraging the sharing of knowledge and best practice, and pushing forward on a variety of preservation R&D initiatives. 

Founded by the Austrian Institute of Technology, the Austrian National Library, the British Library, the Royal and State and University Libraries of Denmark, the National Archives and Library of the Netherlands, Stanford University, Goportis and Microsoft, the OPF currently represents 12 libraries, archives, universities and commercial organisations.  Aiming to eventually bring together hundreds of content holders and preservation solution providers, the OPF will not simply provide its member with access to the Planets tools but also offer guidance from leading experts on creating preservation policy, as well as technical support and training, in the interests of international digital preservation.

Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Library Technology at the British Library and Planets project coordinator says:

“I’ve been creating digital content since the earliest PCs and desktop computers.  It is frustrating to extract content from those old digital media, such as 3.5 or even 8 inch floppy disks.  But it is even more challenging to read or update the content, because the applications that you need for them can’t be found – and if you could find them, they wouldn’t run on a modern computer.  Preserving our ability to access digital content in the future is one of the great challenges of our age.”

“Over the last four years the Europe-wide Planets project has worked to not just raise awareness of the preservation challenge but has developed the tools that will enable organisations and individuals the world over to really start getting to grips with implementing effective digital preservation policies.”

Marc Fresko, Director of Inforesight and independent European Commission reviewer for the Planets Project: 

“I’ve never seen a programme that has delivered against what it promised in the way that Planets has.  An outstanding project it has delivered some significant scientific advances. 

“The establishment of the Open Planets Foundation is unique – it has not been seen before and it says a lot about the success and the commitment from the project. It is fantastic.”

Executive Director of the Open Planets Foundation, Bram van der Werf:

“For centuries the world has built great libraries and universities to collect and preserve for posterity the intellectual and cultural history of the human race.  Yet in the modern age, the diversity and complexity of digital information storage formats requires far more than the existence of physical institutions to ensure long term survival.

“Building on the work of the groundbreaking European Commission Planets project, the Open Planets Foundation will underpin international efforts to continue the preservation of mankind’s collective knowledge, supporting institutions and organisations around the globe as they take on the challenge of preserving digital data.”