2019 End of Year Highlights published

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

Harvard Library joins the OPF 

In November, Harvard Library became the latest organisation to demonstrate its commitment to the future of digital preservation by joining the Open Preservation Foundation. As the largest academic library in the world, Harvard has a unique digital collection and brings a wealth of experience to the OPF community. We look forward to their participation in our programme of events and activities and are excited to be supporting the library as they set about open sourcing their Electronic Archiving System. Read more on this story here, or to find out more about the benefits of becoming a member of the OPF, visit https://openpreservation.org/about/join/.

Take part in the Digital Preservation Community Survey! 

First carried out in 2015, our Digital Preservation Community Survey is designed to capture community approaches to digital preservation and identify the tools you rely on and which resources you use to support your work. The results from the survey, which was opened on World Digital Preservation Day, will reveal shared priorities and gaps in digital preservation today, helping us to focus our community contributions. 

We encourage everyone working in digital preservation to participate no matter the size of your organisation or your level of experience - we want to hear from you! More information about the survey is available here.                 

OPFCON Call for Contributions now open

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 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.

New Memorandum of Understanding between OPF and the DLM Forum

A new memorandum of understanding has been established between the OPF and the DLM Forum facilitating 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.

The agreement was signed at the DLM Forum Members’ Meeting in Helsinki by Jan Dalsten Sørensen (chair, DLM Forum) and Remco van Veenendaal (director, OPF board). Remco also delivered the Foundation’s presentation to the meeting, ‘Sustainability beyond the life of a project’, which explored how, when, and by what means a project becomes sustainable. The presentation highlighted the role of the community and the importance of open source in creating sustainable digital preservation solutions. Read more.

OPF becomes an affiliate member of the Open Source Initiative 

In October, we were pleased to announce our affiliate membership of the Open Source Initiative® (OSI). The global non-profit organisation was formed to share knowledge and ideas about the benefits of open source software, development, and communities. We share the OSI’s commitment to advocating for open source software, and this membership presents the opportunity to engage with the foremost open source software leaders, projects and businesses. We look forward to learning from and sharing our expertise with these new communities. Read more.                                             

Software release round-up

Over the last 2 months, we have made three new open source software releases:

Jpylyzer 2.0: this release contains some major new features, including validation of raw codestreams, an option to generate NISO MIX output, and support for additional codestream marker segments. 

Fido 1.4.0: the new release features Python 3, but Python 2 compatibility has been retained. Alongside improved testing and QA, fido 1.4.0 includes a new command-line option to allow disabling extension matches.

JHOVE 1.24-RC is formed of the contributions made by the software’s global user community. Many of the new features and bug fixes were the outcome of the OPF’s development and document hack weeks, designed to celebrate and encourage meaningful contributions to open source software. The community release contains a new EPUB module, translations of JHOVE error messages into German, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish and French, as well as document clean up and improvement across modules. We would like to thank all who contributed to these releases, as well as our product board for their ongoing guidance, feedback, and support.

OPF webinars: exploring projects and products

Kam Woods and Cal Lee gave an overview of the Review, Appraisal and Triage of Mail (RATOM) project in our November webinar, presenting from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina. The speakers introduced open source methods and tools for libraries, archives and museums to identify email in born-digital collections, review email sources for sensitive or restricted materials, and perform appraisal and triage tasks to identify and annotate records. 

As part of our efforts to prioritise the user experience, improve consistency and transparency, and encourage greater external user contributions, each new OPF software release in 2019 has been accompanied by an explanatory webinar. In November, we heard from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek’s Johan van der Knijff, and Sarah Romkey and Ashley Blewer from Artefactual about the latest releases of Jpylyzer and Fido. The OPF’s Carl Wilson also introduced the JHOVE community release in the fifteenth and final webinar of the year in December, where he gave a users guide to the software and the new features in the 1.24 release candidate.

OPF Blog - Join the conversation!

Covering a range of topics from tools and project news to case studies and best practice, the posts on the OPF blog are submitted by our members and community bloggers alike. 

In a recent post, Kati Sein discusses the value of international collaboration in the OPF’s Archives Interest Group (AIG) and introduces the group’s recent work on analysing spreadsheet complexity.

On World Digital Preservation Day, Alix Bruys, Bertrand Caron, Yannick Grandcolas, and Thomas Ledoux (National Library of France) detailed their work (and misadventures!) with born-digital photographs of Parisian theaters in JPEG Got the Blues. The post, which talked about the proper rendering of 32-bit JPEG was also published in French. Ahead of the recent PRONOM research week, Richard Lehane also posted about the two siegfried tools and their role in signature development workflows.

Our blog is open to all and is a great way to promote your work and get valuable feedback from the community. We would love to hear from you about your work and digital preservation news! Simply sign up for an account to get started. If you would like some assistance with review or proofreading, or simply want to run an idea past us, please get in touch as we are happy to help.

Meet eArchiving in Brussels 

In early December, Carl Wilson presented at ‘Meet eArchiving’, a two-day workshop exploring the eArchiving standards and specifications. eArchiving is one of the Building Blocks from the Connecting Europe Facility which facilitates the delivery of digital public services across borders and sectors. The presentations from the workshop are available here.