Welcome to the Autumn installment of our newsletter, where you can catch up on all of the latest news from the OPF community. Over the past few months we’ve welcomed new members, developed new resources, launched initiatives to celebrate our tenth year, and more! 

Kind Regards,
Becky & Charlotte

Digital preservation community survey results published 

The findings and anonymised data from the OPF’s digital preservation community survey are now available. We received responses on behalf of 98 organisations in 31 countries. The report reveals the types of digital preservation activities that are being carried out, the tools and resources that are being used, approaches to open source, and  more!

The results of the community survey, together with our member survey, have identified several areas of focus for OPF, which will feed into our strategy. 

Thank you to everyone who took the time to answer the survey. 

Download the report and data.
Watch our survey highlights webinar.

Dual Lab and the Swedish National Archives join OPF

We are delighted to have welcomed two new members in recent months. Dual Lab is an IT services provider focused on innovative technologies and science-intensive software development.
With specialisms in PDF technologies, scientific development, process automation and digital transformation, Dual Lab has collaborated with OPF for over six years to develop veraPDF, an open source validator for PDF/A. 

As the official archive of the Swedish government, the Swedish National Archives (SNA) has received and preserved digital records in Sweden since the beginning of the 1970s and has continuously developed its digital preservation methods since this time. As active members of the digital preservation community, SNA collaborates on preservation initiatives with national archives across Europe and in the Nordic countries especially.

Personal lifetime membership awards

In June, we launched Personal Lifetime Membership Awards in recognition of individuals who have made a significant contribution to digital preservation, the OPF and our community. 

These awards are one of several initiatives in celebration of the Foundation’s tenth anniversary. The first three awards were presented to Adam Farquhar, Ross King, and Barbara Sierman at our 2020 Annual General Meeting.

Read more about the awards and recipients on our new lifetime membership awards page.

Identifying community priorities at the PAR workshop

The Preservation Action Registries (PAR) project is a collaborative effort to develop and share good practices across a range of digital preservation systems using common and consistent language. In July, we ran an interactive workshop designed to examine different aspects of PAR and gather input into the next phase of development. The workshop was the second of three events focusing on the project in 2020. Recordings are now available on our YouTube channel.

What's new on the OPF blog?

With many people working from home, it’s an important time to share our work and stay connected with the digital preservation community. Since our last newsletter, we’ve had lots of interesting contributions to our community blog.

Remco van Veenendaal shared the National Archives of the Netherlands’ work on WARC validation and how they solved some mysterious discrepancies in error reporting between JWAT and JHOVE during an OPF tech clinic. 

The digital preservation team at British Library have shared several posts produced as part of their recent blog sprint. Read about their approach to preservation planning, how they’re saving space by removing white space from the METS files, and learn about recent developments in the Integrated Preservation Suite project.

Most recently, Hannah Merwood discusses the work of the UK National Archives and the University of Warwick to create a statistical model to quantify digital preservation risk & compare and prioritise preservation policies.

Anyone is welcome to blog on our site. Whether you’re working on a specific tool or project, developing a policy or best practice, or would simply like to share an idea, we would love to hear from you! To get started, sign up for an account on the OPF website or contact us for advice.

New resources on the OPF website

A virtual conference in celebration of our tenth-anniversary, OPFCON brought together expert speakers on a range of topics throughout the field of digital preservation. We have published all of the materials from the conference, including recordings, slides, posters and the event programme, as part of a new dedicated OPFCON resources page.

We have also created a literature page where you can find our new membership brochure, which is now available in six languages. We’d like to extend a big thank you to our volunteer translators!

Our new website went live earlier this year and we are constantly working to make sure we provide a wealth of useful resources that are accessible and serve the needs of the community. If there’s something you’d like to see or you have ideas on how we can improve our content, please get in touch!

Webinar highlight: The pre-ingest tool and file scraper

In September, we welcomed Juha Lehtonen from OPF member organisation CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland, as our monthly guest speaker. Juha, who is CSC’s Senior Applications Architect, presented two open source tools developed by national digital preservation services of Finland. The Pre-Ingest Tool is a modular tool to make it easier to create Submission Information Packages (SIPs) programmatically, especially in producing METS metadata documents. File Scraper is a tool which is able to identify files, collect metadata from them and check their well-formedness by combining third party software. 

Diversity and inclusion in digital preservation

In collaboration with the Dutch Digital Heritage Network, we are in the process of establishing a new working group focussing on diversity and inclusion in digital preservation. The group aims to be a space to:

• discuss areas of concern
• consider what we can do better 
• work together to promote the work of underrepresented groups
• address barriers to participation in the international digital preservation community.

When we met in September to identify some initial priorities, Daniël Steinmeier from the National Library of the Netherlands shared his paper ‘Inclusion, diversity and digital preservation’ to help start discussions. View the recording of his presentation from WeMissiPRES.

Our next steps will be to open participation in the working group to the community - watch this space!

eArchiving Building Block: reviewers wanted, and call for proposals

Review specifications procedures and guidelines

The Digital Information LifeCycle Interoperability Standards Board (DILCIS Board) are seeking reviewers for procedures and guidelines to support eArchiving specifications.

Originally created by the E-ARK project, these specifications are a core component of the CEF eArchiving Building Block. 

The procedures and guidelines are available, with a short description, a link to the full document, and a set of questions to answer on the DILCIS Board website review page.

Respond to the CEF Telecom call for proposals

The 2020 CEF Telecom call makes an indicative €1 million of funding available for eArchiving. The call covers funding in three key areas: adaptation of existing digital  archives and repositories; acquisition or renting of archive hosting and/or knowledge sharing and training activities. 

Read the call in full and access the relevant documents on the EU Innovation and Networks Executive Agency website.