Two new staff join the OPF team
We are delighted to welcome two new starters at the Open Preservation Foundation, growing o ur team from three to five members of staff:
Charlotte Armstrong has been appointed as Project Officer and will be helping to manage the OPF office as well as supporting our outreach and community activities including workshops and social media.
Martin Speller joins us as Project Manager. Martin will be helping us to improve the management of OPF’s open source digital preservation tools and providing project management for our projects including the Jisc PAR project and E-ARK4ALL.
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veraPDF selected as finalist for the Digital Preservation Awards
 veraPDF, the open source, industry-supported tool for PDF/A validation is a finalist in for the Software Sustainability Institute’s Award for Research and Innovation at the Digital Preservation Awards.
Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, with partners Dual Lab, KEEP Solutions and DPC, veraPDF validates all current parts and levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The validator is accompanied by a comprehensive, atomic test corpus, covering each clause in the PDF/A specifications to test the software.
Funding from the PREFORMA project ended in August 2017. veraPDF is now sustained and maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation. Dual Lab provides active user support and carries out maintenance and bug fixes. The PDF Association’s Technical Working Group continues in their role to resolve ambiguities that arise and helping industry to adopt veraPDF standards.
The Digital Preservation Awards celebrates significant achievements in the digital preservation community. The winner will be revealed at the awards ceremony hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network and the Amsterdam Museum on World Digital Preservation Day on Thursday 29th November 2018.
Read more: http://openpreservation.org/news/verapdf-announced-as-finalist-for-the-digital-preservation-awards-2018/
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OPF at iPRES 2018
Martin Wrigley and Carl represented OPF at iPRES in Boston this September, co-hosted by Harvard Library and MIT Libraries.
Our packed agenda for the conference began as we co-facilitated a workshop which followed on from our PRONOM in Practice online workshops.
During the ad hoc sessions, we gave a JHOVE tutorial which gave participants the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with the tool and insight into interpreting the results. We also shared the current JHOVE development roadmap and our plans for the future.
Our lightning talk, OPF: Our Path Forward, presented OPF’s strategy and future plans, and shared our collective vision of supporting open sustainable digital preservation.
We also joined our PAR project partners present their paper Digital preservation interoperability through preservation actions registries. The slides from all of our iPRES2018 contributions can be found on the OPF website.
We were delighted to see so many OPF members celebrate successes across the conference awards:
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Meet: Micky Lindlar
Tell us a bit about yourself and your role
I am a Technical Analyst at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, which functions as the German National Subject Library for Science and Technology. To put it very broadly: within that role I am responsible for everything concerning “file formats” and “workflows” – including tasks like trouble shooting dodgy PDFs, finding & testing tools to handle different formats and specifying & configuring workflows within our system.
I also lead TIB’s digital preservation team of 5 in daily operations for the preservation of our institutions’ holdings and those holdings of customers, who subscribe to our Digital-Preservation-as-a-Service (DPaaS) offering. The Digital Preservation Lead position naturally comes with the responsibility of ensuring that our processes are still in-line with technological dependencies, producer & user requirements as well as good practice.
How did you get here? What was your path into digital preservation?
I suppose most of us don’t really have a “straight path into digital preservation” and I’m no different. However, when I discovered the field it seemed like everything I had done in life came together – a feeling I still have almost 10 years into my digital preservation life and I consider myself lucky to have ended up in a job I’m still excited about every day.
I’ve always had a deep desire to understand how things worked. As a kid, I had the habit of taking apart various appliances to see how they worked, much to my family’s despair. Later in life, I studied English with a focus on American Literature, because I wanted to better understand the USA as a country and a society. I had a similar motivation for my degree in computer science – I wanted to understand computers better … and figure out how to beat games by finding and exploiting bugs ;-) I worked as an IT administrator for over 6 years and while I really learned a lot in that position and loved the job, I felt there was more. During my student life, I had worked at various university libraries – fond memories of that time led me to a Master’s Program for Library and Information Science, where I learned about Digital Preservation and was hooked immediately. At about the same time, I was fortunate enough to come across a digital preservation position at ZB MED, Information Centre for Life Sciences. TIB, ZB MED and ZBW cooperated in the Goportis Digital Preservation Pilot Project and at the end of the project, I moved on to TIB who hosts the consortially used system.
Read more at: http://openpreservation.org/blog/2018/11/02/meet-micky-lindlar
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Knowledge sharing and best practice in the digital preservation community
OPF webinars
Our monthly webinar series recently included contributions from Bruno Vandermeulen and Hendrik Hameeuw on the advanced imaging services at KU Leuven Libraries, and Jay Gattuso of the National Library of New Zealand, who showcased a standardised mechanism for writing and retaining technical provenance metadata.
The OPF's Martin Wrigley introduced the  OPF reference toolset which explores the tools under our stewardship and illustrates their place within digital preservation workflows. Martin also presented the new roadmap plans for OPF tools and explained some of the ways in which you can follow their progress and contribute to their continued improvement. The recordings and slides are available online and are open to all.
The OPF webinar series explores a range of digital preservation topics and case studies, including tools, methods and projects. We are always eager to hear about the exciting work being done within the community, so please get in touch if you would like to share your knowledge and experience. Equally, if there’s a particular topic that you would like to see us cover, let us know.
Our November webinar will focus on our ongoing collaborative work on the Preservation Action Registries (PAR) project. Join us at 3pm on 15 November to learn about the project, including its outcomes to date and how you can get involved. Booking priority is given to OPF members, who also gain access to webinar slides and recordings following the events. Any remaining places will be open to the community. Sign up to our mailing list to be the first to find out when they are available.
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OPF blog
The OPF blog covers a wide range of topics, from tools and project news to case studies and best practice. A recent highlight was Iris Geldermans’ Dutch Blogosphere: Civilians Cover a Catastrophe, where she discussed blog posts as a bottom-up source for unearthing public reactions to current affairs, and demonstrated the importance of complete web archiving for the social re searchers of the future. In other recent contributions, Peter May called for comments from the community on W3C’s draft Web Publications standard, while Yvonne Tunnat’s post, Sherlock Carriage – PRONOM’s blind spot on (some) PDFs from 2010 to 2014, generated some fruitful discussions about format identification and validation.
The posts on our blog are submitted by our members and community bloggers. It’s 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! Just 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.
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Introducing E-ARK4ALL
The European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation (E-ARK) project set out to develop open source technical specifications, methods and tools for digital archiving. The project, co-funded by the European Commission, ran from 2014-2017 and was rated ‘excellent’ in its final review.
The tools and specifications form the basis of the E-ARK4ALL follow-on programme to establish the new CEF Building Block, eArchiving. The eArchiving building block’s purpose is to provide the core specifications, software, training and knowledge to help data creators, software developers and digital archives tackle the challenge of data management and reuse in a sustainable and interoperable way.
OPF is working on the validator to ensure that information packages comply with the requirements set in E-ARK specifications and on the sample software portfolio which provides an open source reference toolset. OPF is also supporting the outreach and training activities.
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