Archives Interest Group
About
The OPF Archives Interest Group (AIG) was formed in 2016 by three of the OPF’s archive members to collaborate on shared everyday challenges. The group is open to all members and it has grown to include new archive, library and vendor members, but remains driven by archive priorities.
Significant properties of spreadsheets
Preservation of spreadsheets is a challenging digital preservation issue. The AIG worked collaboratively to answer questions such as ‘should we migrate?’ and ‘how do we measure the success or quality of the migration?’. Migration of spreadsheets can cause loss of information or functionality. There is little documentation about best practices in this area.
The report outlines their approach from an initial literature review and choice of methodology through to their analysis of spreadsheet format specifications, comparison of characterisation tools, and stakeholder interviews to learn more about user needs.
A prototype tool the Spreadsheet Complexity Analyser was also developed to distinguish between ‘simple/static’ spreadsheets and ‘complex/dynamic’ spreadsheets in digital collections.
Following a poster presentation of the work-in-progress at iPRES 2019, which won ‘best poster’, the AIG presented a paper summarising the investigation at iPRES 2021.
Blogs
Face-to-face with significant properties: OPF AIG meeting in Copenhagen